Our Experience of the World Is a Mixture of Stark Reality and Comforting Illusion
Or, if we saw reality exactly as it is, we’d become depressed
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Q: How do we overcome distress even when we feel we cannot?
The loss of a loved one is obviously sad — and it would be perverse to suggest otherwise — but very few of us become chronically depressed such as that. We experience distress, but that is short-lived. We all get over it eventually.
Furthermore, we overestimate how awful we’ll feel and how long we’ll feel awful in the face of trauma, but surprisingly, resilience is the most common outcome following a traumatic event. In fact, a significant portion of people claim that their lives were enhanced after trauma. As Seneca wrote, “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
That is the reason why able-bodied people are willing to pay far more to avoid becoming disabled than disabled people are willing to pay to become able-bodied again because able-bodied people underestimate how happy disabled people are. Similarly, chronically ill patients rate the value of their lives more highly than hypothetical patients who are imagining themselves to be in such states.
This difference is due to a phenomenon called experiential ambiguity. Unlike other animals who respond to stimuli as they are presented in the world, human beings respond to stimuli as they are represented in the mind. Objective stimuli in the world create subjective stimuli in the mind, and it is these subjective stimuli to which we react. Our mind is our world, and this has some interesting consequences.
You see when your brain is free to interpret a stimulus in more than one way, it tends to interpret it the way it wants to, which is to say that your preferences influence your interpretations.
For example, one of the reasons why most of us think of ourselves as talented, friendly, wise, and fair-minded is that these words have ambiguous meanings, and the human mind exploits this for its own gratification.
In Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert writes:
Researchers asked some volunteers (definers) to write down their definition of talented and then to estimate their talent using that definition as a guide. Next, some other volunteers (non-definers) were given the definitions that the first group had written down and were asked to estimate their own talent using those definitions as a guide. Interestingly, the definers rated themselves as more talented than the non-definers did. Because definers were given the liberty to define the word talented any way they wished, they defined it exactly the way they wished—namely, in terms of some activity at which they just so happened to excel (“I think talent usually refers to exceptional artistic achievement like, for example, this painting I just finished,” or “Talent means an ability you’re born with, such as being much stronger than other people. Shall I put you down now?”). Definers were able to set the standards for talent, and not coincidentally, they were more likely to meet the standards they set.
This is the same reason why some people would say bitter gourd is good and others would say ice-cream is good. The first group measures the goodness of the food (an ambiguous term) by its nutritious value while the other group measures its goodness by the taste. (As a side note, this is why we don’t seem to agree upon anything. Different people have different subjective interpretations to the same objective stimuli.)
Despite a bitter gourd’s bad taste or an ice-cream’s unhealthy content, our brains would automatically exploit the ambiguity of that food’s identity and allow us to think of it in a way that pleases us, for example, a nutritious veggie or a delicious dessert, rather than a way that does not, for example, a bitter veggie or a fattening dessert.
Our experience of the world — how we see it and imagine it — is a mixture of stark reality and comforting illusion.
If we were to experience the world exactly as it is, we’d be too depressed to get out of bed in the morning, but if we were to experience the world exactly as we want it to be, we’d be too deluded to do anything real. We play in a spectrum of reality and illusion and that’s what keeps us sane, and keeps things moving.
As Daniel Gilbert writes: “We cannot do without reality and we cannot do without illusion. Each serves a purpose, each imposes a limit on the influence of the other, and our experience of the world is the artful compromise that these tough competitors negotiate.”
Thus, in the face the pain of rejection, loss, misfortune, and failure, a psychological immune system gets triggered which strikes a balance that allows us to feel good enough to cope with our situation but bad enough to do something about it. “It was a crappy interview, but next time I’ll try harder.”
Our mind looks for the best view of things while simultaneously insisting that those views stick reasonably closely to the facts. Therefore, you usually don’t go into chronic depression in the face of misfortune. When reality hits you in the head with a brick, you can muster the courage to come out of it more powerful that before. This is the reason why human beings can face almost all the misfortune in the world and still keep fighting without losing faith. And this is what makes us such fascinating creatures.
Next time you fear something — flunking exams, getting rejected, business loss — remind yourself that this too shall pass.
The Power of Storytelling
The person who tells the most compelling story wins. Not who has the best idea, or the right answer. Just whoever tells a story that catches people’s attention and gets them to nod their heads.
John Burr Williams had more profound insight on the topic of valuing companies than Benjamin Graham. But Graham knew how to write a good paragraph, so he became the legend after writing The Intelligent Investor.
The stories in Sapiens are captivating, the flow is effortless. Yuval Noah Harari took what was already known and wrote it better than anyone had done before. The result was fame greater than anyone before him could imagine.
In a perfect world the importance of information wouldn’t rely on its author’s eloquence. But we live in a world where people are bored, impatient, emotional, and need complicated things distilled into easy-to-grasp scenes.
Part of what made Albert Einstein so talented was his imagination and ability to distil complexity into a simple scene in his head. When he was 16 he started imagining what it would be like to ride on a beam of light, holding on to the sides like a flying carpet and thinking through how it would travel and bend. Soon after he began imagining what your body would feel like if you were in an enclosed elevator riding through space. He contemplated gravity by imagining bowling balls and billiard balls competing for space on a trampoline surface. He could process a textbook of information with the effort of a daydream.
Steven Spielberg once pointed out:
The most amazing thing for me is that every single person who sees a movie brings a whole set of unique experiences. But through careful manipulation and good storytelling, you can get everybody to clap at the same time, to laugh at the same time, and to be afraid at the same time.
Good stories create so much hidden opportunity among things you assume can’t be improved.
You’ll get discouraged if you think every new book has to be about an original idea, or that every new company has to sell a brand-new invention. There is so much more opportunity if you see the world like Yuval Noah Harari or Bill Bryson. The best story wins.
Ideas Aren’t Valueless
Without an idea, there is no execution, there is no testing, there are no results to evaluate. It all starts and ends with an idea.
Nobody is going to pay their hard-earned money to you for your idea, unless you can prove that it works, that’s where the execution comes in, but money isn’t the only way to assign value to an idea.
Ideas are hope. If you don’t like how things work, if you don’t like how something is done now, ideas give you hope that things can change. Hope brings people together from all over the world.
There are good idea and there are bad ideas, there are ideas that are worth very little, and there are ideas that are worth everything. How do you know which ones are which? There is only one way to find out for sure. Turn your idea into reality.
Assume You are Below Average
Assume you’re below average. It’ll serve you well. You’ll listen more. You’ll ask a lot more questions. Furthermore, you’ll stop thinking others are stupid, and you’ll assume most people are smarter than you.
To assume you’re below average is to admit you’re still learning. You focus on what you need to improve, not your past accomplishments. Many people are so worried about looking good that they never do anything great. Many people are so worried about doing something great that they never do anything at all.
You destroy that paralysis when you think of yourself as just a student, and your current actions as just practice.
Before You Go…
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I’ll see you next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋