Life Is A Sinusoidal Wave

People often talk about life in terms of 'highs' and 'lows' which got me thinking: can life be represented as a wave? Precisely speaking, life can be represented as sinusoidal wave. This could turn into a fatiguing maths lesson but fear not, it won't be. It's a new way of seeing our lives with mathematics that could hopefully, enlighten you and fuel a hope within you.

Of course, there are limitations to the accuracy with which this model can represent the human life and our condition. The first being: of course our 'highs' and 'lows' are not symmetrically periodic. Yet, they are periodic - which is why this makes quite an excellent model. As I think about this concept, it occurs to me: how valid is the saying we often resort to "everything is going to be okay."? In that case, this paradigm of looking at life can demotivate you - however, in the end, it's all about whether YOU see the glass half empty or full.

What exactly does sinusoidal mean, now? In the simplest words, it looks something like this (ignore the un-uniform, uneven squiggles):

It's what's called a 'sine' wave and it used to represent various phenomena in our physical and economic world such as simple harmonic motion, AC current and power and even, the business cycle. If we adapt this very model, using its nuances, we can utilise it to mirror to a very large extent, the human condition. We can represent our lifespan (time) on the horizontal axis (x-axis) and the intensity of the phenomena in our lives on the vertical axis (y-axis).

Our lives have varying periods of highs and lows; for some, it may seem to stretch on for eons whilst for others, it may last a short while. We can make use of these nuances which exist in sine wave properties to replicate our lives with what seems to be a mundane curve.

For some of us, the period of time for which our lows and highs last for could be longer than for others - like blue compared to red above. Similarly, the intensity of these phenomena also varies from individual to individual (notice yellow and green). The point to note is that in the end, we have an infinite number of possible sinusoidal waves to mirror all the individuals' lives, on the face of this planet.

If our curve looks something like the red one above, I notice that we will tend to appreciate our highs when they come by since the frequency of both the highs and lows are ironically, high. If a person's life curve looks like the red one, they can adapt to better dealing with the extreme lows in the hope that an equally augmented high is incoming.

To look at it in an optimistic viewpoint - yes, the lows become highs gradually. The lows will end. But depending on your life's curve, we do not know for how long they may last. Nor do we even know if we will experience our highest high or lowest low in this lifetime. This may look something like this:

The most important and even, fundamentally life-changing caveat to this is that owing to our circumstances and the way we can adapt our mind to the situations around us, we have the power to change the periodicity and intensities of our life's curve. This concept is extremely revolutionary because it truly illuminates the sheer ability of our mind to be able to completely elevate us, as well as dishevel us. This is the greatest nuance to this concept as it ignites a hope within all of us. Our lives are not a constant harmonic motion of highs and lows - wouldn't that become too boring and monotonous? With the mind, we can alter where we place our awareness and how we think to fundamentally change the intensities and periodicity of our emotions. In the end, yes, the intensity of the phenomena in our life ultimately boils down to the intensity of our emotions. This reinforces how we human beings are intrinsically different to other living beings - our emotions overpower us and importantly, that is alright.

We can alter our mind's thinking perspective and the way we function to extend and augment our highs and constantly change our curve to make sure our lows are not as intense or prolonging as they could be. (For all you maths nerds out there - yes, this is a piecewise periodic function).

Thanks to this caveat and the identification of this nuance, this model could indeed be a life-changing mode of perceiving whatever life throws at us.

I wondered about the saying: "it's all in your head". The thing is - it is ALL in our heads! People often say it to somewhat nullify what they would consider delusion thoughts from another. What matters is that yes - it is all in our head like it is supposed to be and there is absolutely nothing wrong with it.

Now, why have I written this? As much as I love mathematics and I am astonished by the way it is able to map our lives to such a high degree - this is not why I wrote it. I wrote this for all of us who desperately need a different way to look at our lives - to notice how our mind has the absolute power of changing the way we live and see things. We can transform our lives with our biggest asset - our mind. In essence, a lot of things are in our very control even if it may not seem so. The best thing we can do for ourselves is nurture our mental health so it blossoms and importantly, reflects in other domains of our lives.

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Side-note for maths nerds: yes, our lives can start as a cosine function too. Depends on how YOU see being born as - a high or a low *chuckles*.