Mental Traps_ The Overthinker's Guide to a Happier Life - Andre Kukla [4]
Of course this is a spurious argument. The pleasureless hours have already gone to waste. They won’t be redeemed by finishing up. It’s time to cut our losses and run. Paradoxically, our instinct for conservation leads only to more waste.
The absurd reluctance to let go of worthless things may even cause us to embark on activities that have no value right from the start. We may buy objects that are of no use to us because we can’t waste the opportunity of a sale, or eat when we aren’t hungry so that the food won’t have to be thrown out, or cart home junk from other people’s attics. This trap is a first cousin to persistence. Here we’re not caught in midstream by the disappearance of a previous value. What we do has no value from the moment we begin. For the sake of formal elegance, we may consider it to be a limiting case of the same trap. In this type of instantaneous persistence, it’s advisable to quit as soon as we start.
Boring games, awful shows, and sales on items we can’t use possess the happy property of coming to an end by themselves. Not all activities are self-terminating, however. A job, a marriage, or a habit is potentially forever. When an enterprise of indefinite duration loses its value, we may be plunged into a state of perpetual persistence. The mere passage of time will not deliver us from this trap. We’re in a Monopoly game that never ends.
We may perpetually persist at relationships that have turned irretrievably sour, jobs that hold no present satisfaction for us and no hope for the future, old hobbies that no longer bring us pleasure, daily routines that only burden and restrict our lives. Often we stay on a fruitless course simply because we don’t think to re-evaluate our goals. We’ve lived like this for so long—with this person, at this job, in this house and this neighborhood, wearing this style of dress, enacting these dietary and hygienic rituals in this particular order—that it no longer occurs to us that things could be otherwise. Our drab and hateful existence is taken to be an absolute condition imposed on us by fate, like the shape of our head. We may not like it, but there it is. If we stopped to ask ourselves whether we wish to continue along our present course, the answer might be crystal clear. Any amount of insecurity would be preferable to doing this for eight hours a day, five days a week, fifty weeks a year, until we die. But we don’t always ask ourselves. We complain, but we take the necessity of the status quo for granted. Hence we persist in the very patterns of behavior that sustain it. Since the option of quitting doesn’t present itself, the only alternative is to “get it over with,” like a tedious Monopoly game. Unfortunately, this tedious game constitutes our whole life.
Our unwillingness to abandon a bad situation may also stem from a belief that the alternatives are even worse. Perhaps we’ll starve if we quit our job. Our view of the matter may or may not be correct. In either case, this reason for staying on is not a mental trap. It’s the best choice we can make given our understanding of the situation. But we must watch out that we don’t use this type of argument to rationalize the sheer force of inertia. Sometimes we simply can’t change, although every indication cries out that we should. We feel compelled to stay on the same course just as we’re driven to finish the Monopoly game. So long as we remain conscious of our dilemma, there’s some hope that we will break out of the deadlock. Once we’ve neatly rationalized our situation as the best choice of a poor lot, however, it’s all over for us.
It’s particularly easy to fall into a perpetual case