A Trillion Points of Failure

This occurred to me while I was walking to my apartment, which had undergone renovations for more than 3 months. I had asked my uncle to oversee the project, and he called to tell me that a plumber broke a pipe. They needed to remove some tiles and cut into the wall to replace the pipe.

I was frustrated, of course, but I had got accustomed to the various problems since the start of this project, like a supplier having inevitable delays, or something turning out to be much more expensive than my budget. A side note—I used to have a much lower tolerance for incidental failures because most things had worked out smoothly for me, as long as there was careful planning and execution.
I had not found too much difficulty getting into a top college, finding a decent job, and expecting promotions every 2-3 years. Also previously at work, I used to work on my own or with a group of similar-minded people and it was much easier to manage (aka control) everything.

But things started getting trickier since the beginning of 2024.

• I quit my previous job and tried to explore what I can do (you know, hinging on the AI hype). Nothing worth noting so far, after almost a year.
• My father who lived alone since a recent divorce with his second wife had a stroke. After recovery, he insisted starting a roadtrip on his RV because he felt “lazy and depressed” at home.
• I started redecorating my newly bought apartment. Every day there was a new problem waiting for my call, while I was busy flirting (?) with Claude.
• My partner who I had a 10-year-long relationship with asked to break up.

So on that day, while I was walking, thinking about the pipe, my next 1 billion dollar idea, my father's whereabouts (and definitely not my partner), feeling "busy and depressed", I suddenly had a eureka moment. All these simultaneous challenges weren't just a streak of bad luck—they were a glimpse into the fundamental nature of reality itself.

I had been having a Sisyphus battle against more than a trillion points of failure.

Think about it. Our DNA, with its 3 billion base pairs, needs to be replicated nearly perfectly every time a cell divides. Our brain makes millions of micro-decisions each day to keep us breathing and moving. On a busy road, hundreds of drivers make split-second decisions simultaneously, and one wrong move could lead to disaster. Essentially, I was exposed to billions of potential points of failure every second, as I was on my way to the apartment. And yet, I made it through just fine, at least till the moment I published this article.

And how lucky are we if our whole existence, each of us, is such an uphill battle yet we still manage to somehow make it?

We are damn all lucky indeed, but not because we can plan and execute in order to rid ourselves of any failure, but because we also, from the ground up, employ failure-fixing systems at every level, as small as our DNA, and as large as a society.

These systems exhibit some combination or all of the following characteristics

• Leave it be — Sometimes failures, after they appear, are just left as is. Some failures in a system does not prevent the system from functioning as expected. Buildings develop hairline cracks but remain structurally sound for decades.
• Compartmentalization — Large ships employ compartmentalization so that they can sail with a hole on them. The water inflow will be contained inside a reasonably small space.
• Sweepers — Nature is full of sweeper systems. Our body has specialized cells that clean up dead cells and foreign invaders. Cities have garbage collection and maintenance crews. In software, we have error-logging systems and on-call engineers. /s
• Redundancies — Having redundancies is a very good strategy. It often is actually the easiest as it takes less thinking and strategizing to do more of the same thing. Nature understands this well - we have two kidneys, two lungs, billions of backup neurons. A commercial aircraft must be able to take off and land with only one functioning engine. Also, not only can we have physical/spatial redundancies, but we can make use of temporal and procedural redundancies. Rebooting your PC again and again when it stops working is a perfect case of procedural redundancy.

Now back to my own points of failure. After that day, I did change my mindset a bit. I still feel thrilled when things get to work on the first try, but I expect stuff to fail. And they do. My last AI-assisted-productivity-creativity-wellness-booster did not take off (0 sign-ups), but that’s as expected. My other proof-of-concept product did get 50 likes on reddit so maybe I should shift resources there. I and my (ex-)partner haven’t sorted out our long-term relationship, but we are not strangers either and maybe we’ll be in a grey area for some more time. I’ve also learnt to not let my frustration in work sabotage my personal interactions with family and friends. My father is doing fine so far, and I just need to get into sweeper mode when he needs my help.

And you know what? I think there is one more thing that does not exist elsewhere but is quite unique at the level of individual human beings—not lower, not higher, and we don’t often see it in other failure-fixing systems:

We deal better with failures by simply being not afraid.

Fear leads to inaction or overreaction in the case of failure—we either freeze or frantically try to control everything. Overcoming a priori fear of failure allows us to be mentally ready to employ failure-fixing techniques as we need them. And often, throwing fear out of the equation actually makes us more capable of doing so. This is deeply rooted in our biology—when we're not in "fight or flight" mode, our prefrontal cortex can better assess situations and make rational decisions about how to handle a situation. That's just how amazing we human beings are.

This blog might as well fail because of at least a dozen points of failure—I have zero followers on social media, my (non-native) English writing may not be good enough, my thinking can be flawed, or it's just bad timing.

But I think I will do fine.

P.S. To be clear, fear can be also amazing. It is not rooted out by evolution for a reason. But, it serves us best in immediate, physical dangers. Fear does not grasp the complexity of some of our modern problems well and often inhibits us from making the right decisions.