The accidental existentialist

FOR my 33rd birthday, a friend - who evidently thinks that I am walking around in a brain fog every day - gave me a book titled The Art Of Thinking Clearly.

I remember proclaiming loudly that I did not read self-help books and after looking in askance at the header of the first chapter ("Why you should visit cemeteries"), I promptly closed the book and chucked it aside.

It wasn't till months later that, out of utter boredom, I removed it from its "resting area" and thumbed through it.

The crux of the chapterwas about survivorship bias, and how people overestimate their chances of succeeding as triumph is made more visible than failure through various mediums such …