Karma Without the Mysticism
Pierre Teo · Published
I grew up in a Buddhist family, so karma was always framed a certain way: mystical, cosmic, spiritual. Do bad things and the universe keeps score. Some ledger somewhere, settled in this life or the next.
Then I heard Naval talk about it on a podcast, and it landed like an epiphany: karma is just cause and effect, played out over a long enough time.
Take something mundane. You don't clean your room. It gets dirty. You don't take care of your space, so you don't take care of yourself, and you're more likely to fall sick. Nothing cosmic happened — the consequence was baked into the action, it just needed time to show up.
Or take a scammer. Every scam creates a victim, a person who remembers, a reputation that spreads. Human patterns are predictable, and so are their results. We live in a smaller world than we think — most of us operate in the same circles, the same industry, the same city, for decades. Word gets around. Sure, some people get away with it. But karma isn't a guarantee; it's a probability. Over a long enough period, the odds catch up with you.
Karma isn't the universe punishing you. It's compounding. Your actions are inputs into a system — your health, your relationships, your reputation — and the system pays out later, with interest, in the same direction you paid in.
This makes me wonder: what else is like this? What other ideas did we wrap in mysticism because, before we had the language of probability, systems, and compounding, mysticism was the best explanation available?