Instant Karma? Why does it feel real?

Maybe it’s just me, but sometimes, when I work hard and take care of myself, everything else just seems to fall into place. The converse also holds sometimes: I get sloppy, do not take care of myself or my responsibilities, and things just tend to not work out. It really feels like a form of instant karma. This phenomenon got me thinking for a while and in this article, I will talk about the reasons and ideas I came up with. Mind you, this is not a scientific article and I have not done any clinical or statistical research on this.

Actions create Instant Karma?

I believe a large part of this is due to the mindset one employs at any given time. If I am looking to improve myself and work on my environment, I keep an eye out for opportunities. If on the other hand, I am not looking to take care of my surroundings and myself, I will more easily be blind-sided by whatever happens.

Any type of behavior will lead to a feedback loop: a productive and successful day will lead to more motivation the next day. The following day in turn will create more positive possibilities than the last, and a steady upward trajectory is created. The same can be said for bad days. This leads us to the conclusion that we should always strive to improve ourselves, because stagnation immediately leads to deterioration.

I believe continuity to be the key here. Obviously, everybody has bad days, but setting up a framework where one has the best chance of cultivating good habits can make sure the worst days are less bad and the chances for good days are increased. I have written about this in my article Why I make sure to read a book for 1 minute every day.

Mindset and confirmation bias

This is where cognitive biases may come into play. If I have a terrible day and something good happens, it might not register as much, while the slightest inconvenience may seem like a terrible injustice. When having a good day, almost nothing can get you down.

Recently, something happened to me and I experienced this quite clearly:
After having finished my master’s degree and getting hired for my dream-job abroad in France, I was on my way to work. Like always, I used public transportation and I was asked to show my ticket. In the same way, as usual, I grabbed my phone to display my ticket, when I realized I hadn’t purchased one that day, so I got fined.

This struck me as quite the odd coincidence since I am very diligent in always having a ticket. The exact day I forgot to buy one, I ran into the ticket inspectors. While this struck me as being really unlucky, I was not really upset by the situation, but instead thought it was a quirky anecdote. My mood for the rest of the day remained good and I continued to have a productive and pleasant day.

If my mindset had been any different that day, I would have felt wronged and I probably would have complained about this “injustice” for quite some time.

This was just one anecdote, but it really helped me realize how massively our reality is impact by our expectations and perception. Most other days, this would have severely impacted my mood.

The overall concept seems like a version of confirmation bias, where we create a narrative about ourselves and value evidence that supports our narrative higher than evidence to the contrary. Confirmation bias is a well-researched topic and I highly recommend looking into it.

Conclusion

Much more could be written about Instant Karma, but these were my own two cents. If sometimes life feels like things are not going well, it is always worth looking into one’s own actions and figuring out if maybe one’s own mindset and one’s actions are causing most of one’s issues (to the contrary of my previous article: Results-based thinking and what poker taught me). I believe that we create a good part of the reality we live in – even if just by influencing our own perception.