You're setting up for a nice guacamole, some avocado toast, perhaps a salad.

Sadly, that beautiful-looking avocado that you had in store turns out to be bad. Its siblings too.

The whole bag, actually. Damn it.

The manner in which you come to terms with the unfortunate collision between your culinary plan and the stroke of fate hinges upon a simple question:

Did you buy avocados and get ripped off, or did you buy probabilistic avocados and get what you paid for?

Approaching guacamole from the latter, Bayesian perspective is only realistic. One does not simply buy good avocados; only avocado-shaped lottery tickets can be purchased, and tickets they remain until we slice them into outcomes. If the supplier is a trusted one, the odds should be good; but even so, when the goods turn out to be odd, stringy and distasteful, we must put down the knife and reach for philosophy instead.

Life is full of avocados. You can do everything right, and still fail. You can trust someone, and fall from heights. You can think you know what you will do, and be wrong even in that: our future selves are relatives, not clones, and there is folly in speaking for them with complete authority.

When one's drive for linear narration clashes with the meandering unfolding of events and the illusion of determinism breaks, there is often something to be learned. Still, signal and noise are easy to confuse. Did I pick the wrong store? Did I make an error of judgment? Should I just switch to hummus?

Or was this just a bad batch?