Karma is a bitch, proved by data
Recently, I have had a lot going on in my mind and it all seems to boil down to whether or not I consider myself to be a Good Person.
Now you see there’s no calculative way to find out whether one is a Good or Bad person, you just have to rely on what your brain reasons you to be, but calculations just make everything so much easier. And that is when I watched Michael Schur's “The Good Place”.
And I thought to myself, why not give this an objective try. Therefore here I’ve designed myself an Experiment.
Our Aim is to find out :
I)If I am a Good/ Bad person?
II)Is Karma real?
Here’s how we will find out, Firstly I will log every action I do into the Actions spreadsheet and Log every Reward I feel on a separate spread sheet for a week and then we apply the process of Data Analysis on it!
So let’s see how this goes,
Note:
Inherent rewards like my privileges by birth are not included, neither are long term bad/good actions.
The time mentioned is the time the action was logged in most cases.
Some actions are redacted due to privacy reasons.
To see the working please check sheet 1, 2 and 3 in order and then the final sheet and observation sheet.
Incase of any confusion, a peer reviewed the action and I have tried my best to keep the bias to a minimum by not logging points immediately.
Link to see working on spreadsheets:
Actions Sheet - Google Sheets
Rewards Sheet- Google Sheets
Procedure:
1. Log any and every significant action like getting on a train to go to college and every positive/negative reward like eating lays with the date and time for a week.
2. Added an extra Denomination column to rank good things(1), neutral things(0), bad things(-1).
3. Sort sheet to compare and give ranks to all actions.
4. Give points to each with increments of 10 to be able to calculate the total.
5. In the final sheet combine the two sheets to make one table. (Check Final Sheet in Actions sheet)
6. Calculate the actions total and rewards total and compare.
7. Plot the table on a graph to analyze the working of karma (if bad things I did equated to bad things that happened to me and vice versa).
Result:
1. Graph of Actions(blue) vs. Rewards(Red)
One of the most shocking discoveries was how affective karma has been in my day to day. Especially looking at the entry of 10th February. The graph clearly points to how good things I did were equivalent to getting good rewards and bad things to bad rewards with almost equal intensities.
Sum total of Actions = 1130
Sum total of Rewards = 550
So overall, I logged doing significantly more good things than bad, with the worst action being lying to my father marked at -70 and best being cleaning my mom's room for her at 100 points.
Equivalently, more good things happened to me than bad, like being gifted a great pop socket at 100 points and the negative being feeling insecure about my body at -50.
3. Eating good food and talking to my friends before bed was mostly followed by "nice night" reward, implying that I'm in a good mood if I talk to certain people at night.
Conclusion:
KARMA IS SO REAL and I'm an okay enough person.
Even though this experiment did not really solve my problem of whether I'm a morally good person or not, but it surely made me consciously do better. However, a very wise friend did tell me,
"what good we do, we can never be sure that it accounts to plus points because we never know the consequences. However if the thought comes to your mind that you might not be a good person, solidifies you as a great person capable enough to question your own morality." So that has brought me some comfort as I continue to try to be better.
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