Rushang Patel

I was standing in an elevator about twenty minutes ago listening to the Black Eyed Peas. 22nd floor going down. And I had this thought: what if this thing just… stops working?

What if right now, mid-descent, something snaps?

It wasn’t panic, exactly. More like this sudden, sharp awareness that I’m basically trusting my entire existence to engineering I don’t understand, maintained by people I’ve never met, governed by physics I learned about once in high school and promptly forgot.

And then my mind did what minds do when you give them an inch. It spiraled.

What about that air conditioner hanging outside the third-floor window I walked past earlier? What if the bolts are rusty? What if today’s the day it decides gravity wins?

We live like this every single day and we just… don’t think about it.

The Illusion We’re All Pretending to Believe

We’ve constructed this entire life around the assumption that we’re in control. We meal prep on Sundays. We set five-year goals. We argue about the best morning routines like optimizing our first two hours will somehow bulletproof us against the universe’s randomness.

And look, I’m not saying don’t plan. I’m not suggesting we all become nihilists who stop brushing our teeth because “what’s the point, an asteroid could hit us tomorrow.”

But there’s something almost… innocent? Naive? About how hard we clutch at control.

You make the healthy choice at lunch. You take the stairs for exercise. You’re building toward something, right? Except you’re also walking under air conditioners that could fall. You’re trusting brake systems in cars driven by strangers who might be texting. You’re assuming your heart will keep beating in the next five seconds because it’s beaten for every five seconds before this.

That assumption feels solid until you really look at it.

The Elevator Moment

That elevator ride became this weird meditation on trust. Not in any spiritual sense, but just… practical trust. I’m trusting:

1. The maintenance schedule was followed
2. The inspector actually checked the cables last month
3. The building manager didn’t cut corners
4. The company that installed this thing ten years ago did it right
5. Physics will continue working the way it worked yesterday

And I realized that this is everything. This is how we move through the world.

You get on a plane. You eat food prepared by strangers. You drive past eighteen-wheelers at seventy kms per hour with three feet of space between your fragile human body and their cargo. You assume the person walking behind you on a dark street is just walking, not planning anything.

Most of the time? You’re right. The elevator works. The AC stays bolted to the wall. The day unfolds exactly as boring as you expected.

But sometimes it doesn’t.

What We Actually Control (Spoiler: It’s Almost Nothing)

I think we overestimate our sphere of influence by a factor of about a thousand.

We control our choices. Our reactions. Our effort. That’s basically it.

Everything else? It’s probability dressed up as certainty.

You can eat clean for twenty years and still get the bad diagnosis. You can drive perfectly and get hit by someone who didn’t. You can be the kindest person in the room and still lose people you love to randomness that has nothing to do with fairness or deservingness or karma.

The universe isn’t out to get you, but it’s also not particularly concerned with protecting you.

Accepting this isn’t depressing. Actually, I think fighting it is what’s depressing.

The Exhaustion of Pretending

Think about how much energy we spend trying to control things we can’t control.

You check your whatsapp messages forty times hoping the response appeared. You refresh the tracking number like your attention will make the package arrive faster. You replay the conversation, thinking if you’d just said the right thing, the outcome would’ve been different.

Maybe. Or maybe the outcome was always going to be what it was, and you’re just torturing yourself with the fantasy of control.

I’ve watched people twist themselves into anxious knots trying to manage every variable. If I just prepare enough, anticipate enough, worry enough, I can prevent the bad thing.

Except you can’t. The AC falls or it doesn’t. The elevator cable holds or it doesn’t. Your body cooperates or it decides today’s the day for a curveball.

You know what’s actually in your control in that elevator? How you stand there. Whether you’re doom-scrolling or taking a breath. Whether you’re present for those thirty seconds or absent, lost in the past or future.

That’s it. That’s the whole empire of your influence.

Living Like You Believe It

So what do you do with this? How do you live when you really accept that the floor could drop out at any moment?

I don’t know.

I mean, I don’t. I wish I had some tidy answer here, some three-step process for making peace with uncertainty. But I’m standing here the same as you, trying to figure out how to walk around knowing that everything’s held together by probabilities and trust in things I can’t verify.

Some days I think I’ve got it. I feel loose, present, okay with not knowing. I take the elevator and don’t think twice. I walk under buildings. I make plans for next month like next month is guaranteed.

Other days? The thought creeps in and I can’t shake it. What if today’s the day something goes wrong? What if I’m just lucky until I’m not?