Law of conservation of misery

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The law of conservation of misery is a popular adage stating that in a closed system, misery - as energy - always remains constant. It could be said that misery "...is not created nor destroyed, merely transformed".

The spirit of this law is shared with Murphy's law in its implementation: if something good happens, something equally bad will compensate it.

Principles

The principles of this law are*:

1. Nothing is as easy as it looks.
2. Everything takes more time than what you think.
3. If there is the possibility that many things could go wrong, the one which causes more damage will be the only one that will go wrong and it will happen in the worst moment.
4. If you think that there are four possibilities for something to fail and you avoid them, in that moment will suddenly appear a fifth one.
5. When you let things go by their own, they usually go from bad to worse.
6. Just when you are about to do something, wou will realize that there's something you had to do before.
7. Any new solution brings by itself new problems.
8. It's useless to make something foolproof, fools are very smart.
9. Nature's always in favor of the hidden imperfection.
10. Nature's a bitch.
11. If you try to do something even perfect, you will realize you're wasting your time.

*: Roughly translated from the Wikipedia's page in Spanish about the same article.

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