This book isn’t for pessimists, it’s for everyone.
Richard Robinson’s “Why the Toast Always Lands Butter Side Down: The Scientific Reasons Everything Goes Wrong” is a book that rationally explains the science behind Murphy’s law.
For the uninitiated, Murphy’s law is the pessimist’s go-to vibe. It’s essentially boiled down to the idea that “anything that can go wrong will go wrong.”
This book isn’t for pessimists, it’s for everyone. It helps make you feel better by explaining what many of us just assume was inevitable. Well, it turns out, that most of it is our fault and even the fault of our faulty grey matter.
Murphy’s law, it seems, is as much a construct of the technical revolution as it is our own lack of evolution.
Scientifically, this book uncovers the many synapses that our brains fire to decode what our senses sense, but it turns out we discard a lot of what our senses take in because we need shortcuts for survival. The science is in the book, so if you’re interested, pick it up. Suffice it to say that there are ridiculously simple reasons that we look for objects in the same place over and over again, only to discover it was there all along eventually.
It’s also normal to forget why you entered a room, and that’s a relief to many of us; it’s not age, it’s science!
This book places a good portion of our misfortune on our technological explosion. We evolved for a long time and our nature lags far behind our technological explosion. Need some examples? Well, in my lifetime, the internet came into people’s homes as a matter of necessity, phones went from being in the kitchen and maybe a bedroom to being in every room and the car and now in our pockets.
Remember the teacher who told you that you wouldn’t walk around with a calculator in your pocket? Well, you fooled them, but the tech fooled you along the way. Evolution within humanity takes generations, and the phone evolution I just described occurred in just a few decades. No wonder we’re all at Murphy’s mercy!
And the scientific explanation is within our ability to understand, though we probably won’t let go of Murphy any time soon.
There are many highlights from this book that I enjoyed learning about but a few stand above the rest.
“You cannot stop the love affair between pasta sauce and a white shirt.” This one is near and dear to my heart because my mother resembles this statement. It turns out, however, not to be all that true. The fact of the matter is that more often than not the “sauce didn’t splash over your shirt, but it’s true that successful meals are forgotten. Only the disasters count.”
Only the disasters count. That’s a win for pessimists everywhere, I guess.
Ok, but that’s just memory. What about other things like space and time? Turns out that
“time and space are more warped in your mind than even Einstein could have ever dreamt.” Our brains work through the information we give it with shortcuts built in to get us through to the end of the day, and that’s not always what’s real.
“We fancy that what we see is based on rational observation, but because of our suitcase of expectations we are much more likely to see what we want to see.”
This book was an eye-opener, and I think that it’s better to know these things and have an explanation than blame Murphy’s law. No matter how good this book is at explaining anything you can think of as part of Murphy’s law, any of these things, and their opposites, can naturally occur:
“Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.”
“Toast always lands butter side down.”
“When you want to pour carefully, you spill it.”
“Nothing works when people watch.”
We’ll still knee-jerk think of Murphy. And as long as we do, science will have to do better because “a simple lie is better than a complicated truth.” That might explain why any of Murphy’s laws are preferential to the scientific reason any of the things went wrong.
This book is for everyone, dreamers and pessimists alike, even if we’ll probably ignore it for convenience.