Pop-psychologists pontificate prescriptions for popular pathologies. They influence on Instagram. They offer us guidance on how to suppress our baser urges from the covers of magazines in the impulse-buy funnel of checkout aisles. These white-collar gurus are split into factions. One group coaches empathic deep feelers in the facilitation of presence, embodiment, and growth-mindset shifting. Another camp evangelizes to middle managers and self-optimizers about about their biases and blindspots, systematically filling in the chaotic voids with standard operating procedures. Still another cadre preaches the virtues of stamping out fallacious thinking, fuzzy logic, and amateur statistics.
I guess I fall into the third bucket most of the time.
What we don’t see often enough is that all of these domains are incomplete without the others. We can learn to accept our feelings and hold space for the grief, joy, and expressions within us and others. But if we don’t learn to reason about the illusions of the framing effect, then all of our self-care becomes self-sabotage. We can optimize all of our atomic habits until we reverse our aging processes. But if we don’t learn to reason from first principles, then we’re only optimizing the efficiency with which we dig ourselves into one kind of trouble or another. We can learn to spot the errors in every line of reasoning and even become intimated with the limits of cognition themselves. But if we don’t learn how to honestly take notice of the emotions that course through our bodies, well then we just become assholes.
Without efforts toward holistic personal growth, we won’t become people capable of grappling with the complex social maladies we’ve invented for ourselves. In this chapter, I’ll be breaking down some of our more pronounced biases, showing how they actually used to serve us. And — hopefully — helping us all to thank them and let them go. And, maybe we can tidy up some of our fuzzy thinking and victimhood at the same time.
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Good things to come!