FAFO is just “karma” re-articulated, it implies those who do wrong will receive consequences for their wrongness - it implies the universe is just and that innocent people don’t get punished.
Usually rather than admit that nature is not just, that innocent people get punished and hurt for no reason, people instead try to rationalize ways that victims “deserved” it.
For example, the Buddha taught that with enough loving-kindness in your heart, you can become invulnerable to harm from animals, so when one of his monks died from a snake bite, he claimed the monk must have not had enough love and kindness in his heart for the snake to deserve being bitten.
In reality, sometimes snakes act irrationally and bite people who aren’t messing with them. This can happen because the snake was stressed by an unrelated event, or because of disease or illness (much like a dog can attack because of rabies).
Ultimately karma is not just a lie, it’s a system of gaslighting victims into believing they deserved the bad things that happened to them.
I always thought of FAFO as a condensed proverb meaning basically “Think about what you’re about to do and the potential consequences before you do it, otherwise you may overlook an obvious pitfall and blunder straight into it”. I’ve mostly seen it applied to people behaving recklessly in one way or another. Sometimes it’s rednecks doing some jackass style stunt with no payoff, sometimes it’s a business making an obvious blunder that could have easily been avoided, sometimes it’s a politician doing the same. In this sense it’s less about some notion that doing stupid things will come back to hurt you in some unpredictable way and more about the self inflicted consequences that could have been avoided with like 5 minutes of thought. Like you could just leave that snake alone that you can clearly see and aren’t being forced to approach, and you definitely don’t need to put your hand in it’s face and fuck with it, and oh shocked pikachu it bit you who could have seen this coming (except everyone). So to me at least, all it’s saying is just think for a minute before you do something, and maybe don’t do it if you’re most likely going to regret it.
So to summarize
Fuck around = do something reckless without thinking
Find out = suffer the avoidable consequences of your lack of forethought
FAFO is just “karma” re-articulated, it implies those who do wrong will receive consequences for their wrongness - it implies the universe is just and that innocent people don’t get punished.
Usually rather than admit that nature is not just, that innocent people get punished and hurt for no reason, people instead try to rationalize ways that victims “deserved” it.
For example, the Buddha taught that with enough loving-kindness in your heart, you can become invulnerable to harm from animals, so when one of his monks died from a snake bite, he claimed the monk must have not had enough love and kindness in his heart for the snake to deserve being bitten.
In reality, sometimes snakes act irrationally and bite people who aren’t messing with them. This can happen because the snake was stressed by an unrelated event, or because of disease or illness (much like a dog can attack because of rabies).
Ultimately karma is not just a lie, it’s a system of gaslighting victims into believing they deserved the bad things that happened to them.
I always thought of FAFO as a condensed proverb meaning basically “Think about what you’re about to do and the potential consequences before you do it, otherwise you may overlook an obvious pitfall and blunder straight into it”. I’ve mostly seen it applied to people behaving recklessly in one way or another. Sometimes it’s rednecks doing some jackass style stunt with no payoff, sometimes it’s a business making an obvious blunder that could have easily been avoided, sometimes it’s a politician doing the same. In this sense it’s less about some notion that doing stupid things will come back to hurt you in some unpredictable way and more about the self inflicted consequences that could have been avoided with like 5 minutes of thought. Like you could just leave that snake alone that you can clearly see and aren’t being forced to approach, and you definitely don’t need to put your hand in it’s face and fuck with it, and oh shocked pikachu it bit you who could have seen this coming (except everyone). So to me at least, all it’s saying is just think for a minute before you do something, and maybe don’t do it if you’re most likely going to regret it.
So to summarize
Fuck around = do something reckless without thinking
Find out = suffer the avoidable consequences of your lack of forethought
I agree, it’s more like “play stupid games, win stupid prizes”