016 Do you push the elevator button more than once? Do you really believe it makes the elevator faster?

If you ask any elevator operator if pressing the button more than once effects anything, he or she will probably say no. But that's not true. Although it won't affect (or effect?) the speed at which the elevator is going, it will probably boost your morale and make you feel a whole lot better.

Because I think humans are like that. We like to give ourselves the illusion that we are doing something to help, that we are not idle, and our contributions are making a difference of some sort.

But here are the facts. You are not special. You are not a superhuman being saving the world. You are not shifting the world on its axis. You are not discovering some foreign land, and you are not making much of a difference in the world we know today. You are not freeing the people of a country, or showing them democracy. You are not founding Wall Street or starring in a million movies. Your name will probably never be in a history textbook, nor will complete strangers ever say it. You are not much in this world of seven billion.

However, you're doing something. Maybe you gave ten dollars to a homeless man. Maybe you changed his life, because maybe if he didn't have those ten dollars, he would have starved to death. It may not matter in the long run, but it sure did matter to that homeless person.

Maybe you donate five dollars to an organization. You are nothing compared to someone like Bill Gates, who donates millions daily. But the people on the receiving end don't care where the five dollars came from, or whether they were part of several million dollars given to that same charity. All they care is that someone, no matter who, took the time out of their lives to give them a thought and a chance. And that person might be you.

Recently (if six months counts as recent), my friend Peter introduced me to something called The Butterfly Effect. This is both a movie and a concept, and I'm going to refer to the concept. According to Wikipedia, the butterfly effect "is the sensitive dependency on initial conditions in which a small change at one place in a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state." This means that every small move you make will snowball into a bigger and bigger effect in the long run. For instance, in a certain Kurt Vonnegut story that Peter talked about that I've forgotten the name of, a group of men travel back in time to the dinosaur ages. They are told to step on sterilized carpets, touch absolutely NOTHING but observe and take notes. Essentially, they are not supposed to disturb anything, because if they do, the effects on modern civilization could be colossal (or even dinosauric). However, a man on the team accidentally trips off the carpet and steps on a butterfly (hence 'the butterfly effect') and reboards the time-space-ship without telling anyone. When they return to the twentieth century (because this story is old), people are completely deformed and speak an language that sounds extremely different than English. This one butterfly completely changed the course of humanity.

This may seem super unbelievable and kind of exaggerated. A butterfly?? A WHOLE CIVILIZATION??????

But it makes sense, you know. What if whoever invented Greek used a slightly different character? The derivatives of that word would be different, so Latin would be different, so Romantic languages would be different, so German would be different, so English would be completely different. And if you go all the way to the Dinosaur Ages and disturb any little thing, the snowballed effect would be ginormous. Imagine if a certain person long, long ago contracted a disease and died. His/her influence, potential children, relatives, EVERYTHING! would be different. Even though I started off by saying that you are not special, I'm going to say this: YOU MATTER! Without you, the course of an entire civilization could change. Imagine that butterfly. It wasn't so special. But it died, and the entire world flipped upside down.

Wow, I got really off topic. But it's okay. I think that the butterfly effect should get more credit than it does.

- Quibbles 8/2/14