I’ll put a proposition to you. Most of what you think about the world is wrong. Or, to put a finer point on it, most of the reasons you think things are the way they are are wrong. Or, most of the reasons you think you do things have nothing to do with why you actually do them.
That is the case for you and me and Einstein and Mozart and Catherine the Great and anyone else you see on your bookshelf. In fact, when you are on your deathbed (hopefully at an appropriate age that bookends a worthy life), you will pass into the dying of the light with infinitely more about the world that you don’t know than you do. It won’t matter if you’ve spent your life travelling, meeting people and reading everything you could get your hands on. This will make an immaterial difference. And you will share roughly that same ratio with everyone else you’ve ever met and everyone else you’ve ever heard about and respected.
Let’s look at an example to open some mental space for at least part of this idea. Ever since I was at university as a late teenager, I’d explore other people’s behaviour to try to get to the bottom of some things. One particular experiment I’ve done over 200 times over many years came to mind after my first university tutorial. On that day I had my building and room number in my hand. 10 a.m. was the start time. I fumbled my way there using the map I had been given at enrolment. Finding what I thought was the tutorial room, I tentatively poked my head through the door, not 100% sure I had the right room. About a third of the seats were filled, as it was 10 minutes before 10 a.m. I noticed that the subject name was written on the board, so I had found the right place. I also became aware that nearly everyone was looking at me—at least it felt like that—and it felt slightly uncomfortable. There was no one I knew in the tutorial as far as I could see.
I grabbed the first free seat I could find and quickly felt a part of the group. As each new person peeked through the door, I and most of the others glanced at them to see who else would be joining us. A vague uncomfortableness crossed their faces as they repeated the quick sit-down I had done just moments before.
Most of us have been in a regular class or meeting like this. Let’s jump ahead to week two of the class. What is the most likely place most people sit during the second week? All things being equal, the same seat would be the most common choice unless something out of the ordinary happened. As the weeks go by, the chances of sitting in the same seat increase, and if a situation was reached where someone had sat in the same seat for 13 weeks, what do you think the chance of them deciding to move to a different seat are on week 14? Probably pretty small.
Now, this is where the long-term experiment fits in. I’ve asked countless people in the last two weeks of a semester a variation of the following question: “Hey Bob, I noticed you sat in that seat the whole semester. How come?”
In this experiment, I came to expect one of two answers. The first answer, which I heard very seldom, was a variation of “I don’t know. No idea”. The second answer usually was a detailed explanation of why the person sat in the chair. I also noticed that the more intelligent the person seemed, the longer and more elaborate their answer.
For example, an answer I might hear for why Bob sits in a certain seat might be, “Well, the tutor has small handwriting, so it’s easier to read sitting close to the whiteboard. They also talk quite softly, so it’s easier to hear. Sally sits over in the corner and it’s nice being able to look and smile and joke with her. The view out the window here is also great with the trees. And it’s close to the door, so I can make a quick getaway at the end of class.”
Now, this all sounds quite reasonable, and if this conversation had just evolved organically, I may have left the conversation thinking I had a window into Bob’s objective reality and decision making, at least to this small degree. The problem is, nearly everything Bob said here is complete fiction. Bob doesn’t think this. He sincerely thinks he is telling me the truth. There is no advantage here for Bob to consciously make up this explanation. However, Bob has made up his answer right now in direct response to my question and has fooled himself that he is relaying the actual truth of his experience to me from memory. He is, in fact, just conjuring up this “reality” in the moment. In fact, if he were asked this question again by someone else, he would answer the same way, just activating his memory of his answer to the earlier question. The repetition of this answer would deepen Bob’s perception that he is describing an objective reality rather than conducting a form of self-referenced delusion.
Very few people have ever told me anything close to a real map of the truth of their seat choice. Those who have had specific reasons for sitting in a certain seat aimed for this seat in every class. For example, mobility or hearing issues can dictate predetermined choices. However, these are different situations to the answers given by the vast majority of people questioned.
Nobody has ever said anything like, “Well, when I turned up for the first class, I was a little unsure if I was in the right place because I didn’t know anyone in the class. It was only when I saw the class name written on the board that I realised I was in the right place. Then I felt a little uncomfortable with anyone looking at me, and then I just grabbed the first free seat I could quickly see, which was up front to the right. The second week I noticed that most people were sitting in the same seat they were in week one, and I felt that sitting in the same seat made the most sense. In subsequent weeks, I didn’t even consider any other seat, as I sort of felt that this was my seat now.”
Every one of us is constantly doing a version of filtering our understanding of the world and our actions through this “class seating” or reverse-engineered type of thinking, knowing this means we can be less rigid about what we think about the world, especially the negative and limiting thoughts. Again, the moral of the story is, “Don’t automatically believe everything you think”.
One danger here is the thought, “Well, if the negative things I think about myself are just likely fantasies, then doesn’t that mean all the good things I think about myself are just as made up too? Isn’t that only fair?” There’s no rule that you can’t embrace, focus, expand and grow the functional ideas about yourself and starve focus from the “negative fictions” about yourself.
It’s not about what constitutes objective reality. There may be objective reality underneath your thoughts in a particular situation, and your thoughts might theoretically be a good map of that objective reality. However, you will never know this objective reality. The reason is, there are billions of potential pieces of data in your potential awareness in any situation, and you have no way to effectively process all of them simultaneously to get to the bottom of it. You will have certain grooves and biases that you employ to try to make sense of the world in a moment-to-moment way. Your evolved biology will bias and direct your attentional focus to novelty. Historically, this would help move the needle on your ability to find threats, food, mates, and so on. Your beliefs will also act as automatic attentional focus mechanisms. In this way, your beliefs will become a shorthand for your perception of reality or a type of “aftermarket instinct”. These “rules” are usually unconscious and fit very much into the “class seating paradigm”. A socially anxious person is more likely to view silence in a conversation as a signal or proof that the other person thinks they are boring or proof that they are unskilled at keeping a conversation going effectively. We can sidestep the fruitless search for an objective reality. Which phrase is true: “Look before you leap” or “She who hesitates is lost”? Maybe neither. But they both can’t be “true”, as they are opposite ideas. As we’ve talked about before, it is the context you are in which determines what might be a more optimal thought and idea. With high physical risk and low potential payoff, “Look before you leap” would be more optimal. However, with high potential payoff and low physical or other risk, “She who hesitates is lost” would be more optimal. Let go of finding objective reality and pursue instead the best subjective version of reality which is most functional for you in living your values and achieving your goals and dreams.
