The (Rigged) Bingo Game
All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsions, habit, reason, passion, desire. --Aristotle Last night, I dreamt that I was playing a high-stakes Bingo game. The prize: $1,000,000 But some of the numbers on the Bingo card were wrong; for example, "1" was placed under "I." To win, I needed just one number; unfortunately, that was the "I-1" number. I tried to tell the Bingo caller that my card was faulty. He couldn't (or wouldn't) hear me, so the game played on. In the face of impossibility, I kept rooting for "I-1" to be called. But in my heart, I realized that my winning number would never be called; the game, fixed in favor of someone else, had been stacked against me. I awakened angry and lamenting the unfairness of life. However, I have come to realize that we often play games that offer no chance of winning. Extreme dieting, defined as an eating plan that no normal-weight...