Bingo Situations
Published on
Reading Time
15 mins
Intro
Well, well, well. I noticed something really strange: there are cases, situations, and encounters in your life where you start questioning the level of someone else's way of thinking. Sometimes, they leave you completely flabbergasted, wondering how this person could even do that or think that way. There are people without a degree, but they are born with a mentalist mind. Some are fatalists, some are Theodicists, some are post hoc moralizers. You might be asking, what is all that?
Let's go.
Fatalist
I was genuinely amused by this situation. It stayed with me for years and left me wondering about it. There was a neighbor of mine in Dangara City. His name was Darius of Khorshed. He was one year younger than me. One day, he was coming back from school, and I saw him. But something wasn't right. His face was completely red. I asked him, "Bro, are you okay?" He said, "A teacher slapped me, and I don't have a mood. I knew this slap was unnecessary, and I didn't do anything." In Tajikistan, such things happen.
He went back home and told his mother about it. His mother went and talked with the teacher, and some litigation happened afterward. His mother was also a teacher. Ten years later, she was still teaching at a local school, and guess what? She slapped a student even though she knew he was right. What happened? The parents came to see her, warned her, and she apologized.
Then, a neighbor of that mother and a neighbor of Darius approached her. One of them said, "You were punished 10 years ago when your child was slapped because God knew you would slap someone without a reason 10 years later. It was the mercy of the Lord. You got out of that case safely. Now you are even." I was listening to that and thought, man, who are you? How did you even think about that?
It felt like this case had created a completely new neurological path in my brain, changing the way I looked at things. I asked myself: Do I get punished now without realizing that I might do something wrong in the future? Is that why God makes sure to cover that now? It was some kind of retroactive punishment thinking. Clearly, they were fatalists. A fatalist believes that events are predetermined and unavoidable.
Mentalist
We had an old man in the bazaar who sold tomatoes. An extremely old man, just doing his best to have a decent life. But he was the kind of man who was deeply aware of his surroundings. He had incredible situational awareness and a level of thinking you would dream of having.
A man approached the tomato seller and asked how much one kilogram of tomatoes cost. The old man calmly responded, "5 TJS." In Persian-Tajik bazaars, before buying something, you can taste it. The guy took one tomato from him. The old man immediately said, "I know you're not buying anything." The man replied, "Excuse me?"
The old man continued: "One of your hands isn't open. It's a fist. You're holding something inside your fist, and you're taking a tomato from me. It's definitely not sugar. It's salt. I saw you coming toward me with one fist from far away. It's salt because you just came out of an eatery where you were drinking alcohol." I said, "What?" Amazing.
That was the moment I understood that people raised on the streets can sometimes hold more practical knowledge than people with formal education.
Self-Referential Temporal Looping
Hahahaaaa. You might be asking, what did I just throw at you? But hey, man, just listen to this. One day in Dangara, I saw a man stop in the middle of the road and stare at a specific sign in the distance. I approached him and asked what he was looking at. He told me, "I'm looking at this place because one day, my future self will stand somewhere over there and look back at where I'm standing now. I want to create this moment for myself." At first, I thought it was just a strange way of thinking. He wasn't simply experiencing the present. He was deliberately creating a memory for his future self.
Five years later, I saw the same man again. He was standing on the other side of the road, looking directly at the exact spot where he had been standing five years earlier. I asked him if he remembered that day. He smiled and said, "Exactly." His past self had imagined his future self standing there, and now his future self was actually there, remembering what his past self had imagined. The strange part was that the original memory had been created with the future memory already inside it.
That's what I call self-referential temporal looping. You experience the present while simultaneously imagining yourself remembering that present in the future. Then, when the future arrives, you don't just remember the original event. You remember that your past self deliberately created the moment knowing that your future self would eventually remember it. I am here → I will remember being here → I return here → I remember that I once imagined returning here. At that point, you're not simply living through a moment. You're consciously turning your present into a memory for another version of yourself.
Five years apart, two versions of the same person were standing in the same place, looking at each other without being able to see one another. The younger version stood on one side of the road, looking toward the place where he imagined his future self would eventually stand. Five years later, the older version stood there, looking back at the exact spot where his younger self had once been. They were separated not by distance, but by time. In a strange way, both were looking at the other. The younger man was looking toward his future, imagining the person he would become. The older man was looking toward his past, remembering the person he had been. Their eyes could never meet because physics kept them in different moments, yet their thoughts connected them perfectly.
One was creating the memory that the other was now experiencing. Perhaps that's the strangest part of being human: we can create moments specifically for versions of ourselves that don't exist yet, and years later, those future versions can return to experience what we once imagined. Two people from different points in time, occupying the same physical world, separated by five years, looking directly at each other through memory.
Conclusion
Situations can look completely normal, but there is sometimes something much deeper hiding inside them. And I learned something, even if only a little.
The world is big, and we are still on our way, still on our journey.
See you in the next article on my website.
