We Are What We Believe
Friends!
This week I purposefully want to focus and direct my own (and hopefully your) attention to attention. Attention is yet another one of those “obvious” aspects of life that we pay too little attention too! It plays a MUCH more important role in our happiness and life than we think. There is plenty of scientific evidence on the impact our belief system has on our physiology as well as our psychology and overall wellbeing. Placebo is perhaps the most powerful example. Many people will recover (even from things like knee surgery) and report eliminated symptoms of pain and suffering simply from “believing” that they had a procedure or were given medicine (when in reality they were only given placebos).
I have often subscribed to the theory that “if you believe more than you can do, you can do more than you believe”. Sports is a great arena where belief plays a vital role in the performance of both teams and individual athletes. But as is the problem and nature of our modern “accounting”, these “softer” sides of inputs and outputs lack metrics and are often more difficult to see and hence we end up investing much less of resources (time and money) towards them. Same with prevention in medicine.
Consider the media noise around you. It’s almost entirely negative. Its mission is to create attention rather than to educate. Its victories are often measured in defeat and humiliation. Not elevation. I often refer to this culture as “find five faults culture”. Media is like a heat-seeking missile trying to find what’s wrong. But rarely what is right. While having an independent and free press is critical to a functioning democracy I often wonder if the pursuit of negative reporting, the deafening sensationalism, and one-sided reporting aren’t on balance doing more harm than good.
A really wonderful book that made an impact on my young soul was Happiness is a Choice by Barry Neal Kaufman. In there he writes this beautiful and powerful passage that has inspired me for decades.
We could decide, flat out, to stop watching and listening to the news….and to stop reading it, too. We have made an addiction out of being ”informed”, as if knowledge of disasters could somehow contribute to our sense of well-being and serenity. Our lives will never be enriched by the gloomy pronouncements of unhappy people, fearing and judging all that they see. They follow fire engines racing toward billowing black clouds of smoke and ignore the smiling youngsters helping an elderly woman carry her grocery bags. One dramatic traffic accident on a major highway sends reporters scurrying while the stories of four hundred thousand other vehicles that made it home safely go unnoticed. Newscasters replay over and over again a fatal plane crash captured on videotape but rarely depict the tenderness of a mother nurturing her newborn infant.
Simple acts of love, safe arrivals, peaceful exchanges between neighboring countries and people helping each other are noteworthy events. The media bias towards sensationalism and violence presents a selective, distorted and, in the final analysis, inaccurate portrait of the state of affairs on this planet. No balance here. We feed our minds such bleak imagery, then feel lost, depressed and impotent without ever acknowledging fully the devastating impact these presentations have on our world view and our state of mind.
Nicholas Christakis, among others, have done a lot of research around “social contagion” and the importance our close relationships have on our overall happiness in life. We basically are not much different than the average of the people we spend most time with. We are sheep! This is of course equally true with what news and information we consume. And in this pandemic, I think we have good reason to reflect on our “inputs”. Since much of our social interactions have been replaced by digital ones and I fear that the overall “negativity ratio” has gone up. Not good and possibly dangerous.
I was thinking about a few things to attach as “inspiration” to perhaps help ourselves think differently about what we direct our attention to. I have posted them below. Perhaps you can try it this week. Read, watch or listen to something that is entirely focused on elevating a perspective that is free from judgment and simply celebrates what is good about life. Then register if it made you “feel” different. Call it an experiment. Please report back! Like meditation, good sleep, better food, all our daily habits ultimately shape our health and well being. What we feed our minds must be on that list of “consumables”.
Before those links, I wanted to share one of the better expressions of the wonder and miracle of our human progress. In my humble opinion, it cannot be told in a more moving and compelling way. This is the end of Steven Pinker’s book Enlightenment Now.
Remember your math. An anecdote is not a trend. Remember your history; the fact that something is bad today doesn’t mean it was better in the past. Remember your philosophy; one cannot reason that there’s no such thing as reason, or that something is true or good because God said it is. And remember your psychology; much of what we know isn’t so, especially when our comrades know it too.
Keep some perspective. Not every problem is a Crisis, Plague, Epidemic or Existential Threat, and not every change is the End of This, the Death of That, or the Dawn of a Post-Something Era. Don’t confuse pessimism with profundity; problems are inevitable, but problem are solvable, and diagnosing every setback as a symptom of a sick society is a cheap grab for gravitas.
The story of human progress is truly heroic. It’s glorious. It’s uplifting. It is even, I daresay, spiritual. It goes something like this.
We are born into a pitiless universe, facing steep odds against life-enabling order and in constant jeopardy of falling apart. We were shaped by a process that is ruthlessly competitive. We are made from crooked timber, vulnerable to illusions, self-centeredness and at times astounding stupidity.
Yet human nature has also been blessed with resources that open a space for a kind of redemption. We are endowed with the power to combine ideas recursively, to have thoughts about our thoughts. We have an instinct for language, allowing us to share the fruits of our ingenuity and experience. We are deepened with the capacity for sympathy, for pity, imagination, compassion, commiseration. These endowments have found ways to magnify their own power. The scope of language has been augmented by the written, printed and electronic word. Our circle of sympathy has been expanded by history, journalism and the narrative arts. And our puny rational faculties have been multiplied by the norms and institutions of reason, intellectual curiosity, open debate, skepticism of authority and dogma and the burden of proof to verify ideas by confronting them against reality.
As the spiral of recursive improvement gathers momentum, we eke out victories against the forces that grind us down, not least the darker parts of our own nature. We penetrate the mysteries of the cosmos, including life and mind. We live longer, suffer less, learn more, get smarter and enjoy more small pleasures and rich experiences. Fewer of us are killed, assaulted, enslaved, exploited or oppressed by the others. From a few oases, the territories with peace and prosperity are growing and could someday encompass the globe. Much suffering remains and tremendous peril, but ideas on how to reduce them have been voiced, and an infinite number of others are yet to be conceived.
We will never have a perfect world, and it would be dangerous to seek one. But there's no limit to the betterments we can attain if we continue to apply knowledge to enhance human flourishing. This heroic story is not just another myth. Myths are fictions, but this one is true, true to the best of our knowledge, which is the only truth we can have. As we learn more, we can show which parts of the story continue to be true and which ones false, as any of them might be and any could become.
And this story belongs not to any tribe but to all of humanity, to any sentient creature with the power of reason and the urge to persist in its being, for it requires only the convictions that life is better than death, health is better than sickness, abundance is better than want, freedom is better than coercion, happiness is better than suffering and knowledge is better than ignorance and superstition.
Ending part of Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker
Here is to looking out for good!
I have always loved the opening scene of Love Actually. Hugh Grant’s voice over and the scene from the arrival hall at Heathrow is more part of our lived humanity than what the news represents. Love is all around. Indeed.
I found this Apple commitment to be bold, strong, and necessary and the way they announced it to be inspiring and moving. Made me feel good. A greener Apple!
If you want more Positive Psychology and how media is poisoning our minds here is a good talk by Lea Waters, Positive Psychology Researcher from Melbourne
Another good talk on the power of Positive Psychology. This time from Dr. Paul Jenkins. I am also a fan of alliterations and his ending run is quite impressive and entertaining. How about this: Our planet plagued with a pandemic of poisonous pessimism. The popular perception of painful perturbing problems is pathogenically paralyzing. The alliteration starts at 13:30