It just goes to show that even seemingly intelligent humans, when desperate, gullible and possibly even bored enough, will believe nearly everything you tell them and to some extent, resort to illogical behaviour to get what they want.
When something good or bad happens, we lean towards seeking answers retrospectively. We look logically for these answers by re-tracing the steps and putting together the pieces leading up to the events that take place. There is usually a connection between the cause and effect.
For example, “he is so small and thin today because he didn’t eat well when he was younger”, or “he works in a mediocre job now because he didn’t study hard in school then”.
Conversely, we make the subsequent conclusions in nearly every aspect of our day to day lives, for example: Studying harder maximises your probability of getting good results; or: working harder increases your probability of doing well later in life.
But whenever the science and logic fails us and things don’t go according to plan, we fall back on, or turn to the spiritual side of things.
Humans seek comfort in rationalising stuff that happens to them, both the good ones and bad ones, but especially the bad ones.
Hence, the existence of the avocado bell curve god, drinking water mixed with the ashes of books, and the wearing of good luck charms, gods in other forms, amongst others.
The truth is sometimes, the good and bad things that happen in life, they happen for no logical reason at all. A winning lottery ticket, contracting a deadly virus, a plane crash, bad timing when making an investment, black swan events, etc. Events that can significantly change the course of one's life .
Life is a lot simpler when we start to make peace with the things around us, rather than try to make sense of the things the happen around us.
“We are so good at justifying things to avoid our deepest fears. That is one trick the mind is really good at.” - Alicia Cramer