Everyone's Dog is Dead

Well, not everyone. But a lot of my friends had dogs that died this year. Practically this manifested as everyone being sad about their dog out pretty much the same time.

"Sorry I can't support you on your dog death because of my dog death."

My parents wanted to sell their house this year. They were in the house for about 15 years and remodeled it about 10 years ago. They got everything ready to sell which means painting the walls and repaint the doors and fixing the lightbulbs and relandscaping parts of the garden and generally just fixing up all the things that have broken over the past couple years.

It's interesting because since they did that our mailbox is broken and our fridge has broken and the front steps of the house fell off and the air-conditioning is broken and the washer and the bathroom has flooded and the fixtures in both bathrooms don't work. Generally, the house is just falling apart.

Not the whole house. But enough of the house that it feels like it's the whole house.

None of this would bother me much if it wasn't for the fact that I had just broken my shoulder. Because I broke my shoulder and the fridge was broken I was forced to collect snow from outside to use as part of my ice pack. This normally wouldn't bother me if it wasn't for the fact that the stairs have fallen off the front of the house and so I had to leave through the back door which required me navigating through a system of extension wires we had strong because some of the outlets had stopped working.

I think that my experience here generally captures a principle of complex systems whereby things don't break by themselves but rather break in unison with other things.

Probabilistically this makes some sense because things that were generally created together probably have some correlated aspect of failure. But the other probably bigger reason for this phenomenon is that I don't mind any of these things individually, but when they all occur together they're worthy of note.

So bad things happen all the time. But most bad things really aren't that bad. But when many multiple bad things happen at the same time, then these things are really bad. So when one is designing complex systems the question becomes how can I ensure that all of my friends dogs don't die at the same time.