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Missing the point doesn’t have to become a national pastime
Aristotle was the first philosopher to systematize logical errors into a handy list. He referred to them as the thirteen fallacies, one of which is called the irrelevant conclusion. It’s when an argument is given, from which a perfectly valid, sound conclusion could be drawn, but despite having all the information, people come to a conclusion so wrong that it’s even further from correct. Movies and television portray these…
Quickly refuted with healthy, human solutions
Mizzou scientists discovered that cell phone separation can have serious psychological and physiological effects on users. Their study demonstrated that our phones are capable of becoming an extension of our selves such that when separated, we experience a lessening of self and a negative physiological state. What’s most fascinating to me is the questionnaire itself. Because so many of the line items can be easily and quickly refuted with…
However it ends up playing itself out over time
For most of my young adult life, goals motivated me to do things. The experience of setting, documenting, sharing, reviewing, achieving and reflecting upon them was a significant source of satisfaction for me. Until it wasn’t. Until it occurred to me that the hedonic treadmill really has no end. Goals are for the person you are when you set them, not necessarily the person you’re going to be when…
Leave the house one hour earlier
Imagine you’re running late for an important meeting. On the way to the office, you start getting sweaty, hurried and anxious. Sitting in traffic, helpless as a leaf in a gale, you cycle through the excuse barrage in your mind. How will you justify being late so your coworkers aren’t pissed and your client doesn’t fire you? Maybe tell them there was a traffic accident. Say you jumped out…
End the pain of deciding sooner
The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices. And as the decision time increases, the user experience suffers. This law was first uncovered in the fifties, and since then has become a key tenet of effective web design. Ask any of the programmers you know. Nobody wants to paralyze and frustrate their user. Kill all the pointless features and just give…
That’s serious stuff. Dropping avocados is not.
The cashier bagging my groceries accidentally dropped a few of my avocados on the floor. No problem. Happens to everybody. They’re just going to be mashed into guacamole in twenty minutes anyway, right? But in that moment, here’s how the woman responded. First, she slammed her face into her hands and started berating herself for being an idiot. Next, she yelled out for one of her coworkers to come…
I wonder how I can never have this problem again
The emotional and psychological burden of having to think about certain things can be very high. Which doesn’t mean those things are not worth thinking about at all, but we do our nervous system a disservice when we psychologically tie ourselves to more things than are necessary. Isn’t life already burdensome enough? Why not free ourselves from these albatrosses that keep flying after us everywhere we go? Here, let…
If you were feeling good about yourself, how would you view this situation?
Blood simple is when criminals lose control of full rationality at the moment of committing the crime and inevitably leave incriminating clues behind. As a result, the consequences of their acts quickly swirl out of control, and everything goes to hell. Coens made their debut movie about this phenomenon in the eighties. It makes for a compelling plot line. But what’s interesting about the film is, you don’t have…
Sucked into the vortex of social pressure
People pleasing is a learned behavior. Most of us were trained from a very young age, by parents, teachers, coaches and other authority figures, to either meet people’s expectations, or follow our own essential desires and suffer the consequences. This behavior served us well when we were children. It kept us safe and helped us grow. However, as adults, the disease to please can have the opposite effect. Think…
Liberated by one or zero
Here is a short quiz to gauge what your relationship with temptation is. *Do you have trouble stopping something once you’ve started? *Is it easier for you to give something up altogether than to indulge moderately? *Do you feel peace and gratitude at the thought of never having to get or do something? *Do you loathe spending your precious energy justifying why you should go ahead and indulge? If…
