Toying with Fate

Thought experiment #1: How would you act if you have the ability to somewhat affect someone’s (perception of their) fate?

OK just so we are clear, this isn’t something as serious as actually changing someone’s fate.

Source: https://allabout-japan.com/en/article/1285/

Suppose…you are running a Japanese shrine, more specifically the one section where you can pay (or is it free?) a sum of money for one fortune telling ballot, piece of paper thing, which is apparently called O-mikuji. These papers supposedly contains your ‘luck’ for…some period of time. These O-mikuji papers usually contains one of the following:

• ‘Blessing’ or good luck, comes with different degree of how good the blessing will be: Great blessing, middle (standard?) blessing, small blessing
• ‘Curse’ or bad luck, comes with different degree of how bad the curse will be: Great curse, middle (standard?) curse, small curse

So one thing I have been wondering is, whatever supernatural entity we are praying to in this shrine, the shrine itself or more specifically the O-mikuji are going to be run by flesh and blood humans right? Which means there are going to be some people writing, printing, preparing these O-mikuji papers the day before.

So here is the question: Assuming a lack of standardized guidance on how to run these O-mikuji(s), how are your going to allocate the proportion for each O-mikuji outcome?

Are you going to:

1. allocate all of them in an equal manner, 50–50 for blessings and curse (and around 16–16–16 for each great-middle-small variants of each)
2. skew them in one direction?

So I went and asked friends on Instagram, to which I got very little response, but we’ll work with whatever we can get:

1. “Just switch the allocations every now and then”, some artist
2. “100% blessings, why would you curse someone?”, some consultant
3. “Skew towards the blessings, once the word goes out, you’d have more visitors, thus more $”, some government employee

I’m kinda disappointed that no one wants to have a curse-vaganza.

I believe this can go a lot of ways. Let’s explore some scenarios below.

50–50 everything

Your shrine is a boring shrine and no one will remember your shrine’s (and your) name.

Skew more towards blessings

As pointed out by some government employee, if we put more blessings than curse in our O-mikujis, chances are with more people getting blessings fortune, word may get out that this shrine is a truly ‘blessed’ shrine. Word may get out and people will start talking. Oh this shrine’s O-mikuji is very good, people usually gets good blessing, let’s pray there, yadda-yadda. The shrine might become more popular, and more people will buy your O-mikuji, which will return more money.

All just by allocating more blessings than curses. You can make a person believe that their life will be good!

Of course, your brilliant O-mikuji allocation method may not really affect their life. For all we know, some guy could get hit by a truck after buying your O-mikuji and getting a ‘great blessing’.

But what it could do, is change people’s outlook on stuff happening to them! If you prime someone to believe that they are going to be lucky that day, chances are they will look on usual ordinary occurrences more favorably.

For example take a seemingly very ordinary event, and make it happen to two different person, 1 receiving ‘blessing’ O-mikuji, and 1 receiving ‘curse’ O-mikuji. Let’s say the event would be….picking up some small change from the street, like IDR 500 barely enough for anything these days. We can imagine these two people will react differently:

• dude who got the ‘blessing’: “Hey I got some small change! My luck is beginning to look up!”
• dude who got the ‘curse’: “Dang is this a trap? If i pick the coin, what are the chances that I will be assaulted from behind, or worse, someone assaulting my behind?”

So I imagine the dude who got the ‘curse’ will be on the lookout for some bad event, thus he is primed to look at stuff in a negative way.

Hell if the dude got hit by a truck he might go all positive-vibes-only and think “ah thanks to that truck now I have a legit reason to skip work”.

So while you can’t actually change someone’s fate, you can at least change their perception by allocating more blessings! You rock, champ!

100% blessings, why would you curse someone?

I dunno, if every O-mikuji is a blessing…it might rouse suspicions you know?

That aside, that statement actually got a point. Why the hell would you actively make someone’s day worse? They paid for that O-mikuji and you gonna tell them “hey here is the great curse you paid for, i hope you have a nice day but probably you won’t haha be careful when crossing the street”.

But not giving out curse O-mikuji might affect the sense of the legitimacy of your O-mikuji I guess.

From this point, we can begin to see the weirdness of running a fortune telling gig. Unless you are really doing so through supernatural means. If not, it means you actually have the choice what to tell people, to make their day better or worse.

Skew more towards curse

OK hear me out. Maybe we can milk some money from this method.

That is by offering ‘curse removal services’ of some kind to those who wish to improve their luck!

So imagine you bought your O-mikuji, and ta-da you got a ‘great curse’! Oh no! You start to worry, you look both ways when crossing a one way street, is that old guy behind who is carrying an umbrella hiding a sword in his umbrella? Is he going to stab me with that sword-in-an-umbrella? Oh no is my wife going to leave me?

Then, you start remembering past stuff. Yesterday your favorite bread wasn’t available when you came, is that a sign of bad luck? You got reprimanded by the boss last week at work, is that a sign of bad luck? Just last night your daughter told you that she doesn’t want to go to law school and want to start a bakery instead! How preposterous! Why isn’t anything going your way??

Then, in your hours of crisis (and paranoia), you notice an ad in the shrine. It says it can help ‘mitigate’ the effect of curses by buying a ‘holy amulet’!! Buy this amulet to turn ‘great curse’ into neutral or even a ‘small blessings’!! It’s just IDR 500,000!!

You buy that, and you calm down. You got hit by a deer which escaped from the zoo later that day, but that’s a story for another day.

So in this case, we..convince people that they are in a bad situation, and then you convince them that you and only you hold the (paid) key to fixing their bad situation! This is genius!!!

OK this is damn near scam territory, if it isn’t already. But I’m really curious which one will end up being more profitable, skew to blessings or skew to curse.

100% curse baby

Why would you do that you ass?! They gonna call ghost busters on your shrine!

So in conclusion…there is no conclusion..yet. Unless someone’s willing to run an experiment on this.

Anyways, the whole concept of human beings who are themselves objects powerless against whatever supernatural forces that shapes our fates, create a business model by commoditizing luck or fate…is weird. But it’s wonderful! You want to make money by making someone’s day better or worse for no apparent reason? Sell fortune cookies maybe!! Just remember to rig the proportion of good and bad lucks there according to your purposes!

Perhaps you can give people you don’t like some fortune cookies, but ensure that some truly demented shit is written in there, destroy their day!