Have you ever known something is doomed?

Sure. Usually it is easier to see it when observing others than when it is something we are involved in ourselves I think. Relationships seem to fall into this category a lot, although you knew it about your own marriage I guess? But, I wonder if people on the outside new it about your marriage when you thought you were happy and engaged?

I’ve known when jobs are not going to work out for myself and others.

But, I have been wring of course. Where I think something won’t work ojt, and then it doesn, and vice versa.

Yes, at a couple of start-ups I worked at.

Nothing as un-seemingly-related as bride/groom figures falling down… but I’ve been able to pretty solidly predict the failure of several relationships or jobs or what have you in the past, mostly just based off my attitude and those of those involved.

Also business related, I was in banking. When a new customer called asking about a loan I could usually tell within the first three or four minutes of the call if I wasn’t going to be able to make the loan. I also saw the Concorde taking off on TV after a piece of metal came off the runway and punctured a fuel tank and caught fire. That was a pretty crappy feeling.

Have I known that something is doomed? Absolutely. And my feeling is not always right.

It’s easy to look back on a situation and think, “I knew at the time that this was not a good idea.” There are occasions where we can guide the person through a thought process that leads them to the right (meaning our side) conclusion. In many cases, it is a matter of letting a person learn it on their own. Relationships fall into the latter category.

Absolutely, I am highly intuitive.

To be honest, no.

I believe that I can be prone to making logically unsound post-hoc associations between a bad feeling and a subsequent bad event (triggering “ah ha, I’ve been proved right!” kind of thoughts), when in fact, I’ve had plenty of times when there has been no such association between bad feeling and subsequent bad event. As such, I’ve no reason to think I have the knack of “knowing” that something is doomed because sometimes my negative thoughts about the future are right, and sometimes they’re not. I guess the reason that it’s so easy to create a superstitious sense of “knowing” about impending doom is because the times when we are proved wrong aren’t at all salient and don’t stick in our minds (I don’t know about you, but I’d be way more likely to forget about having a bad thought that turned out to be about nothing).

Having said that, I think the obvious exception to what I’ve said is when your prediction relates to an outcome that you can actively interfere with. So if I feel, say, a friendship is “doomed”, then it may well end up being “doomed” because of the actions I take as a result of those negative feelings… if that makes any sense!

Yeah it happens all the time. When I see a spider in my house, it’s doomed. When a pizza finally arrives after an hour and a half of waiting, it’s doomed. Cooking a new recipe and it’s starting as a big bowl of slop – doomed. A fresh 30-pack of Rolling Rock on a Friday night – doomed (and possibly a couple of lightweights at the party are doomed). I’m also into web marketing, and I can tell when a given website showing up on Google is doomed. New social networks and other gimmicky websites and services that pop up, doesn’t take much to tell which ones are doomed. Also when I play Final Fantasy, and cast “Doom”, the enemies are…yep…doomed.

@reverie – either you’re overthinking this, playing devil’s advocate or you don’t really get out much.

@gambitking – haha, none of those! I just personally find it fun to think about thinking, and I enjoy noticing and trying to make sense of odd or illogical things that our minds seem to do automatically. Occupational hazard for me, I suppose!

Only thinking of where my call of failure was on target (though I wasn’t always spot on with the scale of how miserably things went): A couple marriages (one was glaring to anyone with a pulse except, apparently, the groom – I think the bride at least suspected), a friend’s vacation (that was a bad one), several business prospects, numerous small companies (though not always for the reasons I thought), the occasional meal (yay for delivery!) and restaurant (though I been wrong more often than right), a bunch of movies (at least from my perspective – I’m sure someone out there enjoyed The Creeping Terror outside of MST3K), a couple of my wife’s coworkers, etc.

I kind of had that feeling when Yugo came to the US market. A Fiat design made in Yugoslavia was doomed before product came off the assembly line.

I remember R. Dawkins’ ”Brights” – I mean, seriously? You want to promote atheism by suggesting the rest the world is uh… kinda dimwitted? lol, not really a bright move.

Let’s put it this way. Even the feeling of something being doomed from the start, has an opportunity to be doomed as well. Catch my drift?

My wife used to say, during her drug addiction days, that every relationship is doomed to end. I told her, even your thoughts of relationships that are doomed to end is doomed. So using that logic, breaks the cycle.

@_Whitetigress A bit of a Mobius Strip that one! But makes you think . . .

Our atmosphere if geoengineering doesn’t work.