The Hidden Forces Controlling Your Success and Failure

Why You Can Do Everything Right and Still Fail

2025’s job market is being called the worst since 2008. Right now, 13% of young people aged 16–24 are NEETs — not in employment, education, or training. Traditional markers of success are getting harder to reach every year. There’s a surge in gig work, short-term contracts, job insecurity, stagnant wages, and rising costs of living, rent, and house prices. University degrees? Most aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on anymore and no longer guarantee work. The world’s more interconnected than ever, which means you’re no longer just competing with people in your town, state, or country — you’re up against remote workers from across the globe. And on top of that, highly specialized AI agents are rapidly swallowing up repetitive tasks that once kept people employed.

Just like those young people, you might feel like you’ve failed at some point in life. Like you did everything right. That prize promised at the end of the conveyor belt of your education never came. From the time you were a child, you were slotted into grades at school, told that if you did X or Y, you were a good boy or girl, and you’d get to move up to the next level. Each grade was just a stepping stone toward the next one. You did your lessons, attended school, passed your exams, maybe went on to further or higher education — you did everything right. And all the while, the voice of the culture was cheering you on: You’re doing great! Just keep going. Get that master’s degree, land that management job, hit this pay grade. The good thing is coming. It’s been promised to you your whole life!

Now, many are starting to realize it was all a lie. And when that comforting, supportive voice of society turns on you, it shouts: Well, no one’s entitled to work. No one’s entitled to a house. It’s your fault you’re in this position. That’s golden-grade gaslighting. The truth is — you’re on your own. Yes, it was a lie. It was scaffolding that collapsed the moment you stepped into the so-called ‘real world’. And now, you hate yourself for feeling like a failure, as the goalposts for success shift a little further away each year, getting harder to reach while your motivation quietly runs dry.

But you’ve done everything right. And you’ve still failed. Why? Why should this happen to you? You behaved well in school, did what you were told, excelled in your exams, followed all the advice, studied hard, maybe worked part-time. Maybe you even got your foot in the door of the working world. And you worked for years - decades even - Yet it still doesn’t feel like you’ve “made it” does it? Deep down, you feel the same way you always have.

When you’re searching for a job, every tiny factor can sway whether you—or the other candidate—lands the position. The look of your resume, the words you use, whether it contains the right keywords from the job description, if it passes the AI’s automated resume scan, whether it catches a recruiter’s eye, or if it’s tossed out to make the hiring manager’s job easier. Whether they like your voice on the phone, your style, how you look, speak, and act, and whether you seem like a good fit for the team during the interview. Whether someone on the panel was having a bad day. Whether the other candidate knows someone inside the company. It all boils down to a million micro-factors completely out of your control.

Let’s take this to the meta-level. Let’s apply this not just to a job application, but to your goals in life as a whole. You believe you’re a failure. That you’re responsible. That you’re the “doer” of your own life — and if you can’t grip it, control it, and steer it in the direction you want, then you must be stupid, lazy, or incompetent.

But think: Do you control where you were born? What country, what town, what family, what environment? Did you control the experiences you were exposed to as a child — the places you saw, the music you heard, the things you were naturally drawn to? Did you control your teachers, the culture you grew up in, your genetics? How your brain reacts to positive reinforcement, or your subconscious drives to fit into society? Did you control the subjects taught at your school? The budget, the resources, the quality of the staff? Did you control the countless factors that shaped your interests through your teenage years? The friends you made, the character you formed, the identity you moulded? Did you control your ambitions, your goals, or the targets set by the relentless force of cultural indoctrination and social conditioning?

When you started working or went to college, did you control government decisions on interest rates, currency value, or the free hand of the market? Did you control the cost of living? How your colleagues perceived you — enough to be favoured for a raise? Did you control the endless, invisible factors that determine when positions open? Did you control the pandemic? The loss of your job? The infinitesimal chance that your resume lands with the perfect employer and sets you on a steady path?

What about the cost of housing? Do you control how others see you, what they think of you, whether you’re respected or deemed worthy of merit? Do you control the cultural attitudes of the time?

I’m really driving the point home here: there are a mathematically endless number of micro-factors shaping your life — both linear and non-linear. Thank goodness the ancient Vedic worldview knew about this. My friend, you are simultaneously suffering and enjoying your Karmas.

And no — not the “You didn’t say thank you to the barista, then you spilled your coffee” kind of karma. I’m talking about the three main Karmas that the ancient Vedic sages taught thousands of years ago.

1. Your Sanchita Kārma (Accumulated Karma)

This is the total storehouse of karmas—actions, causes, and effects—that have yet to bear fruit. Every action creates an equal and opposite reaction. You’ve been sending ripples of cause and effect since your first breath, and quite possibly even before that. Think of it as your main database, your hard drive. It’s massive, mostly dormant, running quietly in the background. Most of it isn’t actively shaping your current experience—just like how most of the files on your computer’s hard drive aren’t being accessed or used at any moment. It’s all the data you’ve accumulated over time: programs you’ve installed, files you’ve created, downloads, cache—everything. Most of it just sits there, taking up space, quietly influencing what’s possible. Like Kārma, it’s the total accumulation of everything you’ve “done” with your computer.

2. Prārabdha Kārma (Ripened, Active Karma)

This is the portion of your Sanchita Kārma — the total mass of accumulated karma — that’s been selected to bear fruit in this lifetime. (And no, you don’t have to believe in literal past lives to grasp the logic here, so stay with me.) This karma determines the conditions you’re born into: your body, your genetics, your preferences, your family, major life circumstances, and those core challenges you never consciously chose. It’s the inevitable, the unavoidable — the karma already in motion.

Think of it like your laptop’s RAM: Random Access Memory. This is what’s actively loaded and running right now. The internet browser you’re reading this on, your operating system, maybe a couple of messaging apps in the background. Check your Task Manager — these are the programs and processes actively affecting your laptop’s performance in this moment. They deliver different stimuli, steer your attention, and shape what actions are available to you inside the interface of your life. You can’t just quit critical system processes without consequences, and some programs need to run their course before they’ll fully close. This is ripened karma. It’s here now, and it has to play out.

3. Kriyamāna (or Agami) Kārma (Newly Created Karma)

This is the karma you’re creating right now through your current actions, thoughts, and intentions. And yes — this part is in your control. To some extent.

It gets added to your Sanchita storehouse and can shape future lifetimes, or even tweak the trajectory of this one. Think of it like the real-time operations you’re performing on your device as you read this. Every click, keystroke, file save, or app you launch is affecting your current session and writing new data to your hard drive for later. Some changes take effect immediately (like scrolling down to read the next section), while others get quietly saved to storage, waiting to influence you when you reboot, reopen, or stumble across those files down the line.

Your current experience (RAM / active processes / Prārabdha Karma) is limited by what you’ve previously installed on your system (hard drive / Sanchita Karma). But at the same time, you’re constantly making new choices that affect both your current session (Kriyamāna Karma) and add new data to your system for future “boots” of your life.

Let’s say you and a friend both apply for the same job. On paper, you’re clearly the stronger candidate — you’ve got the qualifications, the experience, the polished resume, you’ve reached out to the hiring manager, and you even know someone already on the team. It feels like a sure thing.

Then comes the email:

“Thank you for your application. Unfortunately, we have decided to move forward with another candidate…”

What?! How?!

Cue frustration, anger, disappointment, bitterness.

But maybe you did do everything “right.” So how did you still lose out? Simple. Your friend had different Prārabdha Karma. The program they were running fast-tracked them into that role. They were magnetically pulled in that direction— you were repelled from it.

There’s a famous Taoist story that echoes the exact same principle. But to keep things relatable, let’s modernize it.

There was once a software developer who had been in a long-distance relationship for three years. Her boyfriend lived across the country, and they’d been making plans for her to relocate. Just as she was about to quit her stable job and move, her partner ended the relationship via text.

Her friends were horrified:

“What? What a terrible way to be treated! How dare he? I can’t believe he’d break your heart like this. I’m so sorry — this must be awful.”

She sighed: “Yeah… maybe.”

She was devastated, and needed a fresh start for her mental health, so she decided to move anyway — but to a different city, where her aging father lived alone. Her family had worried about him since her mother’s death, but no one else could afford to help full-time.

Her friends said:

“Well… at least something good came out of this mess. You can be there for your dad.”

The developer replied: “Maybe… maybe.”

The move meant leaving behind her comfortable tech job for an uncertain job market. And as luck would have it, the 2025 job market was the worst she’d seen since 2008. Rising interest rates. Surging inflation. Massive layoffs sweeping through tech. Job postings vanished overnight, and even senior developers struggled to find work.

Everyone said:

“Terrible timing! You should’ve stayed put, kept your safe job!”

She shrugged: “Maybe… maybe.”

With the job market frozen, she freelanced while caring for her father. The housing market crashed, and rental prices plummeted. With demand collapsing and landlords desperate, she found a beautiful apartment for half of what it would’ve cost just a year earlier — a place she could never have afforded while fully employed.

Her friends observed:

“Well, at least you’re saving on rent… but freelancing is so unstable.”

She replied: “Maybe… maybe.”

One of her freelance gigs was with a small healthcare startup developing telemedicine software. She used their platform while looking after her dad and quickly noticed its flaws. She suggested fixes, built better implementations, and soon her ideas led to major improvements. The company offered her equity and a full-time developer role.

People said:

“Wow — what perfect timing! Your personal situation made you invaluable to them!”

She smiled: “Maybe… maybe.”

As the company gained traction, geopolitical tensions disrupted global supply chains. But their telemedicine platform became essential infrastructure as international travel stalled and healthcare systems buckled under pressure.

Everyone said:

“You’re so lucky to be in healthcare tech right now! This global mess made your company indispensable!”

She replied: “Maybe… maybe.”

With explosive growth came acquisition offers from major tech giants scrambling to pivot from consumer apps to critical services. But with success came longer hours, more stress, constant travel — all while her father’s health rapidly declined.

Her friends said:

“Bittersweet, huh? The job’s booming, but you’re missing precious time with your dad.”

She sighed: “Maybe… maybe.”

When her friends asked how she stayed calm while life spun so chaotically, she smiled and and said:

“Two years ago, my ex dumped me by text. I thought my life was falling apart. Turns out, it was falling into place.”

Her friend looked up, smiled, and said: “Maybe… maybe.”

You see, have you ever actually considered how much your failure and success is in your hands? When we succeed, we say “I deserve it! I did this! It’s because I am a great fit for the company” or “I worked so hard at my business” - you believe you’re responsible for your successes, and your ego and self-esteem gets a nice massage from it.

We have this attitude in our whole western culture, the Orange Modern Value system says - work hard, hustle and you will enjoy the fruits of your labour! So the nepo babies, trust fund children and CEO’s sons enjoy their success, gain confidence and position. Their Kriyamana karmas become more potent, powerful, positive. But if you are a failure, if you find yourself in difficult situations - it’s entirely your fault. “You are responsible for yourself. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps. You did this to yourself!” And so the child born into poverty without education begins to hate himself and the society he was raised in. His thoughts turn negative, his Kriyamana Karmas are self-sabotaging, and they spiral downward.

Logically a whole society of people that believe 100% in self-determination and self-responsibility only would exterminate itself whenever it cannot shape the outside world to the exact laser cut mould that it wants. If everyone were not a millionaire, then there is some fundamental error in the population. The mind would turn on itself, saying ‘you are the reason you are not successful or happy. To gain any peace now, you must delete the thing that stands in your way - yourself.

A certain Vedic text reminds us of this perfectly:

“You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions. Never consider yourself the cause of the results of your activities, nor be attached to inaction.”

Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 2, Verse 47 (2.47)

See, 5% of human brain activity is conscious. This includes deliberate thought, focused attention, and voluntary actions—what we are actively aware of and can intentionally direct.

So I ask every neoliberal capatalist, every hustle culture entrepreneur who believes we are 100% in control of our success, the following: Did you control your birth time? Your genetics? Your upbringing? Your influences? Your education? Preferences? Interests? Access to resources? Of course if you really could pull yourself up by your bootstraps, if you could really mould your own destiny, you’d consciously turn yourself into a money making success machine with no flaws at all, getting exactly the result you want at all times forever.

But that’s not how it works. Because the remaining 95% of our brain activity is unconscious. We’re unaware of it, how it guides us, how it influences us.

But Rowan, are you telling me to sit back and have life come to me? I don’t think that will work. You want me to resign myself to some ‘fate’? Won’t that just mean that I’ll become lazy and won’t make anything happen?

Again, you missed the point. I’m not saying to not be ambitious. I’m ambitious. I set daily tasks, goals, deadlines, vision boards, review my progress every week, month and quarter and conduct deep annual reviews and reflections on my life. Results or not, that is my Prarabdha Karma. The program that is running just makes me that way, and gives me the results I get. I’m not using results in a positive or negative sense here, but in a neutral way - the emergent result of the operating software. If you’re a tech nerd, you know that properties are emergent from systems. And your Prarabdha Karma is the system that is causing the emergent properties of your life circumstances. Your Prarabdha Karma is making you the way you are, and giving you your results in life.

This is not about ‘sitting back and waiting for life to come to you’, as we literally just saw in the most revered book of an entire subcontinent:

“You have a right to perform your prescribed duties, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions. Never consider yourself the cause of the results of your activities, nor be attached to inaction.”

Do not be attached to inaction. And do not be lazy. Be ambitious. You have desires in this life, don’t you? Things you want to experience, create, or achieve? Of course you do. So chase them. Perform your actions. Work towards your aims. But never get overconfident. Never convince yourself you control the whole universe — that your circumstances exist solely because you made them so. Be grateful for your successes, but don’t become entitled to the fruits of your actions.

Plug away at your goals, day by day, and accept what comes, whether it’s fortune or failure. Acceptance doesn’t mean passivity. It means recognizing: “Okay. That’s the situation. That’s my Prarabdha Karma. Now, I’ll use what conscious will I have — that precious 5% — to tilt the odds in my favour.”

It’s like a little game of pinball. The entire mechanism of the machine is your Prarabdha Karma. You don’t control the machine itself — you only get those two flipper buttons when the ball rolls your way. Claiming you got the highest score means nothing if you didn’t build the machine. And claiming “success” in society is just the same — you didn’t lay the groundwork thousands of years in the making, you’re just playing your round on it.

To re-iterate the point, systems theory has long recognized the reality of non-linear dynamics.

For example; a seemingly harmless tweet about a flaw in a company’s product acts as a catalytic node in a complex adaptive system, triggering disproportionate ripple effects across social, corporate, and economic domains. Niche social media communities amplify the flaw and joke about it, media outlets sensationalize it, and recursive feedback loops form between public discourse, PR management, market perception, and corporate response. Stock prices plummet not because of objective facts, but because of collective emotion. Inside the company, stress cascades through delayed bonuses, tense work environments, and strained relationships, while individual coping behaviours quietly reshape health, productivity, and consumer trends.

At the same time, unexpected opportunities surface. New leaders emerge, public discourse sharpens around corporate accountability, and people sidelined by the system find new, alternative paths. It’s not a simple downward spiral — it’s a dynamic interplay of breakdowns and breakthroughs. Negative outcomes like demoralization, volatility, and health impacts coexist with positive emergent properties: startups filling market gaps, reforms in leadership culture, shifts in public values. These recursive, overlapping feedback loops — driven by human psychology, emotional contagion, and identity dynamics — reveal how seemingly minor actions can unpredictably reorganize entire interconnected systems. The result isn’t linear cause and effect, but a living, evolving web of adaptive consequences.

You see, life is a game, and the act of playing the game has a way of changing the rules.

Your Prarabdha Karma isn’t fixed either. Yes, we explained that Prarabdha Karma is sort of seen as your karmic ripening that determines some of the circumstances in your life. But remember, it is inherently nonlinear. Just because a circumstance can be fated doesn’t mean the precise sequence of causality is linear or predictable. Life is an entangled, dynamic system of interdependent variables: remember, your total sanchita karma might be different to others, and your own conscious actions in your life (Kriyamana karma) also play into your results. And to compound that, others peoples karmic ripening is overlapping with yours.

8 Billion people with their own karmic unfolding overlapping with yours.

The infinite play of cause and effect interacts within the interconnected, adaptive system of karma. So Karma doesn’t contradict complexity, it is expressed through it.

And yes, the ancient vedic sages were aware of this too, they called it Ṛta or cosmic order. Ṛta, the cosmic order, isn’t a fixed, mechanical determinism - it’s an intelligent, dynamic cosmic principle that self-organizes through feedback loops. It ensures the balance of dharma (order, that which upholds) and adharma (disorder) through adaptive responses in the universe. It gets so mind bending that even those sages admit there are countless invisible, unknown, untraceable causes (adṛṣṭa) at play in any event. They recognized the impossibility of linear prediction - the exact unfolding of Karma is known only to Īśvara (’God only knows’).

The Gita says:

कर्मणो ह्यपि बोद्धव्यं बोद्धव्यं च विकर्मणः । अकर्मणश्च बोद्धव्यं गहना कर्मणो गतिः ॥

“The intricacies of action are very hard to understand. Therefore, one should know properly what action is, what forbidden action is, and what inaction is. The path of action is indeed unfathomable.”

Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 4, Verse 17 (4.17)

This implies the causal web is too complex, too recursive, and too dynamically adaptive for linear understanding — a nod to the inherent non-linearity of karmic unfolding.

Remember, even your eyes reading this message, the brain you have, the language you interpret these pixels through, is just a tiny little node of the dynamic interconnected system at play.

And yet the events and results in your life operate in this web in such a way as to counter-intuitively emerge some form of determined outcome.

Remember, the Prārabdha Karma may determine your birth country, the city, the culture, the year, your genetics, your family, your talents, preferences, education, career. But it is dynamically operating - the way those circumstances unfold, how they’re interpreted, integrated or responded to is dynamic, recursive and co-create by your Kriyamana karmas in real time.

Yeah, I’m pretty mindwarped by it too. And you probably now want to sink into your chair, eat some candy, and mumble, “Oh well, it’s in the universe’s hands, so I won’t do anything.”

No.

You don’t get to do that, you lazy hippie. No slacking off. You still have goals to chase, ambitions to fulfill, experiences to taste.

If I’m playing a video game, in order to win the game and get what I want, which strategy works best:

A) Realize that the game is-predetermined, sit back and play half-heartedly

B) Forget that the game is pre-determined, but get frustrated, bitter, angry and suffer whenever the game doesn’t go my way despite my best efforts, focus and involvement?

Neither.

The best approach would be both - to internally realize that the game is literally pre-determined, but act, and be engaged within the game, as if it wasn’t.

Remember:

“There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”

Brutus, in Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare (Act 4, Scene 3)

Ok, Rowan — if life is so chaotically nonlinear yet somehow predetermined, how do you explain the Vedic worldview deploying technologies to track these dynamics and predict individual life circumstances? Enter Jyotish — the ancient science we now call astrology, masterfully developed in India.

The Vedic worldview understands the cosmos as a fractal, integrated system where the macrocosm and microcosm mirror one another. Jyotish doesn’t predict mechanical certainties. It reads the qualitative state of your karmic field at birth and how it’s likely to unfold. The positions of the planets aren’t causes of events, but symbolic reflections of deeper karmic patterns — much like a strange attractor in chaos theory reveals recurring tendencies in complex systems.

Life’s events arise from the nonlinear interplay of Prārabdha karma (destined experiences), Kriyamāṇa karma (current actions), collective karmas, and environmental conditions, producing emergent outcomes

Even within apparent chaos, order manifests through recurring karmic seasons. Jyotish maps these probabilistic fields, indicating periods when certain life themes — growth, loss, challenge, or opportunity — are more likely to surface. It’s less a fixed script and more a cosmic weather forecast for the tides of karma.

And crucially, while external events may still follow these patterns, a realized being — a jīvanmukta — is no longer bound by them. In this way, Jyotish reveals not deterministic fate, but the deeper archetypal flow of life’s nonlinear, dynamic, unfolding Karmic probability.

All well and good, — but how does this actually improve my life?

Simple. You start to realize that certain parts of your life are predetermined. You don’t “own” all your achievements. Stay humble. Stay content. Stay grounded, regardless of your external circumstances. Don’t oppress yourself or spiral into depressive submission when (not if) you fail. Or when you inevitably fall short of society’s impossible ever-changing standards. Or when you meet with so-called “negative” circumstances.

And when things are going well, don’t get high on your own supply either. Notice how even in your victories, the craving for more doesn’t stop. The satisfaction never really lands.

If you want to take the middle path and get heads up on where things might be heading, consult an astrologer. (I happen to know one.) And if you want to loosen the karmic glue that might be binding you to certain results — good or bad — the Vedic tradition is stacked with practices designed to do exactly that. They won’t erase your karma overnight, but they’ll start giving you a little more wiggle room, a little more conscious influence over your fate. A little more control over that precious 5% of your mind you have control over.

These practices are called Sādhanas — and the translation is almost poetic: ‘Tools.’ Tools for loosening old patterns. Tools for carving new neural pathways. Tools for the playing the game of life with a little more power and a lot more peace.

See, this is the kind of worldview — the sort of approach to personal success - that the hustle culture bros won’t stumble upon for decades. They’ll keep beating their chests with pride, basking in their apparently important social status, as long as their Prārabdha Karma keeps handing them those good results.

But when that same Prārabdha Karma inevitably takes those things away, if they still believe they are the sole architect of their fate — if they still cling to the illusion that they are the doer, the controller of life — the path to self-destruction starts looking dangerously attractive.

It’s like an AI on a laptop tasked with growing a mango inside the hard drive, with instructions to keep going until it succeeds. Faced with the reality that it is not the “System Administrator” it will either self-terminate as the optimal solution, or the computer will run out of battery and die.

And listen — this isn’t a “fate or free will” lesson. It’s both and. It’s Always Both / And. And once you see that, you realize you can actually use this worldview to your advantage. Imagine how your personal system dynamics — those Kriyamāṇa Karmas you’re creating right now — might shift if you truly downloaded this perspective. Your reactions would naturally become calmer, wiser, more centered. Do you think that might subtly alter the trajectory and results of both your Kriyamāṇa and Prārabdha Karmas?

This is how you can take an outdated, misunderstood concept of “fated events” and, paradoxically, turn it into a tool for greater personal agency. You don’t escape the system — you learn to move through it differently. Consider this newsletter an experiment: internalize its message, observe how you respond to setbacks, opportunities, frustrations. I’m not promising it’ll magically rewrite your fate into a highlight reel of wins and bliss. But I am saying this posture dramatically increases the odds of generating more aligned, constructive actions — which, in a dynamic, recursive system, means you start building upward momentum over time.

See, my friends — I’ve been unemployed for six months. Not exactly a flex in today’s world. Job applications going nowhere. Savings dwindling. Résumé gap growing uglier by the day. By any conventional standard, this should be the start of a textbook “downward spiral.”

You’d think I’d be panicking, right? Anxious, desperate, stressed out. But I’m actually relatively content. Happy, even. And I know what you’re thinking — “How is that possible? You’re unemployed, broke, and you’re just fine?”

I’m in a cool new city, met a great girl, continue applying for jobs, and weirdly, I’m content. Not because I’ve escaped risk or found some secret life hack, but because somewhere along the way, I noticed the dynamics of this worldview operating. I started seeing my life not as a random mess, nor as rigid fate, but as a dance between what’s unfolding and how I show up to meet it.

Now, to most people, that probably sounds insane. “You’re unemployed, broke, and reading ancient Indian astrology to make sense of your life?”

Yep. And it’s working.

Not because it changes what happens — but because it changes how I move through what happens. And when you change that, you start subtly reshaping the system dynamics you’re caught in. Like being caught in thick vines — the more you struggle, the tighter they grip. But when you relax and move with them, they loosen, letting you slip free.

It’s not delusion. It’s not denial. It’s the only sane response to a universe indifferent to your schemes, yet graceful toward your presence — the impersonal absolute that is, paradoxically, love itself.

Maybe… Maybe.

-RH

“Misfortune is what fortune depends upon; Fortune is what misfortune hides within. Who knows where it will end?” - Tao Te Ching