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April 9 - June 9, 2024
So here’s me saying it, maybe to the void, maybe to you: Whether you’re under the spell of a lover or a leader, it’s never too late to cut your losses. At any time, you can unload the heavy pack from your shoulders, leave it on the mountain, and turn back, because the view you were promised isn’t actually up there, and it’s not worth the climb anymore. It’s okay to forgive yourself (after all, everyone has their baggage) and to build a life that’s so full, and so yours, that you never really sunk any costs at all.
This kind of scarcity-minded sorrow is rooted in zero-sum bias: the false intuition that another party’s gain directly means your loss.
The puzzle of zero-sum bias is typically discussed in the context of economics, in the pervasive suspicion that a transaction cannot possibly benefit both parties equally.
The overthinkers among us (hi) are well positioned to turn our already clunky instincts about money into full-blown paranoias that everyone we trade with for anything—not just cash, but time, clout, or ideas—exists only to deplete us.
Most acutely, zero-sum bias affects those who’ve been nurtured by individualist societies, which stress win-lose binaries at every turn.
In 2017, a sequence of experiments conducted out of the University of Michigan found that students living in East Asian countries were significantly more likely than Westerners to value being a “small fish in a large pond.” That is, they would prefer to work a lower-ranking job at a more prestigious company than higher up at a small, no-name firm.
Pitting myself against other women on the internet was a pattern long ago embedded in my system, but now, it wasn’t just about looks, it was about my career, my wit, my soul.
It was hard not to notice how these zero-sum plights disproportionately affected the women in my life. Where gender and social comparison are concerned, research indicates that women are prone to make more upward comparisons and downward identifications.
by elementary school, girls have already learned to compare themselves only to the peers they perceive as superior. By contrast, when men glance around a party or scroll through their feeds, they’re more likely to notice only their less attractive peers. Their impression from there is, Cool, I guess I’m the hottest guy here, and that’s a self-esteem victory. When women survey their circle, they only spy the “threats.”
teenagers with TikTok use disorder (compulsions to scroll to the point of negative life interferences) suffered heightened anxiety, depression, stress, and working memory difficulties.
no modern evidence supports the claim that acting bad is a cure for feeling bad. “Given the way the brain works, catharsis does not even make sense. We do not become less likely to [do] something by practicing it,” noted a 2013 study on the psychological effects of venting. Snorting a bunch of cocaine never made anyone want to snort less cocaine; shit-talking just encourages a person to shit-talk more, all the while making them look shady to whoever’s listening. Indeed, psychologists have established that when we disparage people behind their backs, something called “spontaneous trait
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Recognizing that other people can think and feel differently from us is essential for harmonious relationships.
Together with her best friend Aminatou Sow, journalist Ann Friedman coined “Shine Theory” as an actionable solution. In a beloved 2013 piece for The Cut, Friedman advised, “When you meet a woman who is intimidatingly witty, stylish, beautiful, and professionally accomplished, befriend her. Surrounding yourself with the best people doesn’t make you look worse by comparison. It makes you better… True confidence is infectious.”
I wanted to understand how video blogging shaped these patients’ relationships to their own mortality.
This psychological reconfiguration is the work of survivorship bias. It’s an error that shows up not only in life-or-death scenarios, but anywhere “success” is measured: business, fitness, fine art, war. Survivorship bias beckons thinkers to draw incorrect conclusions about “why” something turned out well by fixating too narrowly on the people or objects that made it past a certain benchmark, while overlooking those that didn’t.
At its roots, survivorship bias is like proportionality bias in that it’s powered by a fundamental misunderstanding of cause and effect. Similar to the misjudgments that inspire conspiracy theories, survivorship bias encourages thinkers to read positive causation into patterns where only correlation exists.
This craving to transform senseless misfortune into a logical narrative was part of what motivated Racheli, Sophia, Mary, and Claire to launch their YouTube channels to begin with.
What about the human mind convinces us that a piece of novel information is worthy of panic, and then, just as perplexing, what makes us so quickly forget and move on?
The brain’s emotional headquarters is much older and more primitive than its rationality department, the prefrontal cortex. The limbic system has been around since human beings’ only two significant concerns were to find food and avoid becoming it.
In noble pursuit of keeping us alive, our emotional brain has “first dibs” on interpreting incoming information.
While the prefrontal cortex is well equipped to sort through complex datasets before arriving at a conclusion, it only has second dibs, and the amygdala prefers to get there via cognitive pole vault.
A 2019 study by scientists at the Technical University of Denmark suggested that over the last century, the sheer quantity of knowable information has caused the global attention span to shrink.
This cognitive exhaustion, paired with our attraction to newness, causes us to flip-flop between topics at quickening intervals.
A professional task is not necessarily meaningful just because it’s pressing, and vice versa.
In her 1928 novel, Orlando, Virginia Woolf remarked, “An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation.”
“People like us who believe in physics know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
But there’s no intoxicant stronger than the mix of familiarity and surprise.
How much newness we experience largely defines our sense of time. Without memory, time doesn’t exist, and the borders bookending clockable events are the checkpoints we need to chart its passage. That’s why time felt so twisted during COVID-19 lockdown. A 2020 survey conducted in the U.K. revealed that more than 80 percent of participants felt like quarantime was distorted. We didn’t have as many experiences worth recording then—simple life things, like knocking back your first oyster at the new bistro in town or chancing upon an incredible wool coat in the haystack of a thrift store, or even
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When you fall in love, the opposite takes place. All that novelty between me and Casey caused us to be thoroughly present, elongating the hours to a hundred times their clock length. This is also why childhood feels so long—because everything was brand-new. Or at least brand-new to you.
recency il...
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Different from joy, awe is the kind of humbling wonder associated with immersion in nature, live music, collective dance, spiritual rituals, and psychedelics. It’s the particular emotion that arises “when we encounter vast mysteries we don’t understand,” wrote Dacher Keltner, UC Berkeley psychology professor and author of Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.
“As artists, we seek to restore our childlike perception…. Most of what we see in the world holds the potential to inspire astonishment if looked at from a less jaded perspective.”
A person is “in flow” when their attention is so effortlessly consumed by an enjoyable challenge that “time disappears, you forget yourself, you feel part of something larger.”
These results don’t require a lifetime of training; in 2023, a study published in JAMA Psychiatry reported that people who received just eight weeks of mindfulness lessons enjoyed a decrease in stress comparable to the effects of Lexapro.
A 2017 study from the Journal of Environmental Psychology reported that, compared to city strolls, taking walks in nature elevated mood, decreased stress, and relaxed participants’ sense of time.
As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote in 2012, “Perhaps wilderness is an antidote to our postindustrial self-absorption.”
Humans are the only living species that have chins.
Studies of phone addiction have found that the little hits of dopamine that keep users jonesing for notifications come with a tragic side effect—they actually inhibit the amount of dopamine we feel when exposed to real-life novelty. Said another way, phone addiction decreases our ability to enjoy new experiences in the physical world. When you’re hooked on novelty in electronic form, new foods and flowers lose their magic.
When the Apple CEO presented his very first iPhone model, it didn’t work as described, and there was no guarantee it ever would. When does confidence go from aspirational to tacky to worthy of prosecution?
The inclination appears in three key forms: people overvalue their actual skills, express excessive certainty in their evaluations, and overcredit themselves with positive outcomes. Austerely, this trifecta is labeled overconfidence bias.
Researchers have deduced that unless a person is navigating some major psychological interference like PTSD or clinical depression,I nearly everyone alive naturally overestimates their moral compass, everyday skills, and common knowledge with a consistency I still find hard to accept. Well over half of folks surveyed think themselves above average at driving,II cooking, and sex, even though only 50 percent can be.
A 2011 Nature study proposed that natural selection may have favored a swollen ego, as it enhanced resolve and perseverence, made it easier to bluff opponents in conflict, and generated a self-fulfilling prophecy where self-assuredness alone fostered better chances of survival.
“There is nothing like success to blind one to the possibility of failure.”
Anderson noted that genuine self-assurance can be measured by certain verbal and physical cues, like speaking both early and often in a low, relaxed tone.
A 2014 study in Scientific Reports concluded that overconfidence is promoted by the very act of “self-deceptive bluffing,” the kind of deep con where you don’t simply act like you’re better than you are, you honestly believe it.
In 2022, a Bloomberg survey found that 98 percent of American middle and high schoolers expressed the desire to be internet famous.III NINETY-EIGHT PERCENT.
The risks of overconfidence extend far past all-you-can-consume comedy skits and skincare routines. Inconveniently, the modern mind tends to exhibit the most overconfidence precisely in scenarios where accurate judgments are hardest to make. These include new and unpredictable technology (AI, interplanetary travel), natural disasters (hurricanes, climate change), and polarizing political figures (I can think of one or two).
In the late 1980s, a comprehensive review of wrongful convictions in the U.S. uncovered 350 instances where innocent defendants were found guilty of capital crimes “beyond a reasonable doubt.” In five of those cases, the error was discovered before sentencing. The other 345 were not so lucky: 67 were sentenced to prison for up to twenty-five years, 139 were sentenced to life in prison, and another 139 were sentenced to death. At the time of the review, 23 defendants had already been executed. As Wesleyan University psychologist Scott Plous summed up in his book The Psychology of Judgment and
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American culture provides such mixed messaging on the matter of confidence. Flaunt your accomplishments, but don’t be a narcissist. Be authentic, but also be perfect. Tell the casting director you can tap-dance even if you can’t and someone else is better for the job. I wish I knew how much confidence was the “right” amount to have. How much will help you succeed professionally and feel internally content but not cross over into such delirium that you risk causing damage and annoying the living daylights out of everyone?
imposter syndrome,
