The probability of loss

Listen: Love's Not A Competition - Kaiser Chiefs

I don't know about you, but what do you think about the probability of loss?

I'm not thinking about the statistical probability, just how you as a person measure the chances of your losing something. Something valuable, something borrowed, something new.

Death, for one thing, reminds people about loss. I think that's part of the reason why people are sometimes so cautious about talking about death. The memory of loss can be hard, though on what basis can I say that, at this age, I don't know.

Here's what I've been thinking - people measure the probability of their losses differently. I mean, if you live in Malaysia, you wouldn't think about the probability of losing your family and possessions to an earthquake. But that's an unusual situation, and what I'm really concerned about is the probability of losing everyday things, the people and things you take for granted.

Most people - and I'm guilty of the same fault as well - tend to think that the people and things they have today will be with them for a long time yet in the future. So they think, "Never mind, I'll do that tomorrow." or "I feel like calling him/her today, but I don't feel like it today, so probably tomorrow." And so tomorrow becomes the day after and the day after that, and you're in Monday and you've forgotten what you wanted to do.

So what happens when you lose something? A sense of loss, definitely, that empty feeling of not having something anymore. The familiar things and people have become a habit, so when you realise one day that you can't reach them anymore, or use them again, it's as though you walked down the stairs and missed a few steps. I hate that feeling, even in dreams.

But people measure their probability of loss differently - some overestimate, and act accordingly. Others don't - they think their risk factors are not many; they expect the same things and people to be with them for years yet without much effort on their part; they seem to think that just because they view their probability within a lower range, the other side does as well.

But it doesn't - it doesn't - work that way.

There's another side of the coin as well - the irrational fear of losing anything. You might become a hoarder, or you might overreact when there's even a little bit of chance that you might lose someone or something, no matter how unlikely the probability.

For me, though, I used to worry. But I try not to think about it now.

Things go missing; they get lost; they get stolen or taken away. People leave, or you lose touch, or you decide to leave because it's not going to work. With inanimate things, you probably can't gauge how much they measured the probability of going missing. With people though, when the loss happens, you find that both sides measured their probability of loss differently all that time that you thought you valued each other the same way.

But there's a reason why it's called a loss. Both sides lose. But here's what I think - the more you stay mired in the loss, the more you think of what you should have done, the bigger the loss looks to you after it has occurred. It's a strange thing, but why do we value things with a higher worth after they're gone?

But what's past is past, and though you will remember a particular loss for a long time into the future, the most you can do now is to raise your probability of loss - for the things and people you have now - higher than you did before. It won't stop you from losing, but it's better to be the one who tried the most to mitigate the risk, than the one who took it for granted all along.

Sometimes you win by losing. Not because the probability of loss goes away entirely, or because you choose not to have any, but because you know that should it happen again, you're prepared for it.