Why does the same thing always happen to me?

Madness is the magnification of the ordinary.

Someone parks their car, gets out, locks the doors with the key, walks around the car and checks that the doors really are locked. A common case, nothing unusual about it - if the person walks around the car once. Twice is already odd. Three times? Four times? Five… There is a threshold beyond which any empathetic bystander would call an ambulance. If someone goes around the locks 57 times after every parking, they clearly have a problem.

We all live in a time loop

What films like Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow have in common is the same basic idea: the protagonist gets caught in a time loop and lives the same day over and over. The dynamics of the plot are identical too: the protagonist wakes up, dies at the end of the day, then wakes up to the same day again; at some point they notice this, try to escape, resign themselves to it, start going mad, and finally observe consciously what is happening, analyse, work out a strategy, keep trying - and their efforts are crowned with success.

In reality we all live in a time loop: life situations repeat, the same difficulty we could never solve comes at us again and again, the same situation that always brought pain. And although it happens too many times, it is nowhere near frequent enough for us to recognise it as a time loop.

Not again! Why does this keep happening to me? It seems this is my fate! Sound familiar? That is the time loop.

When the characteristic event returns, let us notice that we are in a time loop: slow down, calm down, pay attention, examine, analyse, form strategies and keep trying! In the films it is persistence that frees you from the time loop, and that works in real life too.

What time loop are you in as a trader? What is it that repeats? Be glad of it, because it is an opportunity!