Mental Traps_ The Overthinker's Guide to a Happier Life - Andre Kukla [5]
Not doing something is also a project without an end. We are never finished avoiding olives. These habits of omission are therefore liable to persist perpetually. In fact, they are especially liable to persist. It’s relatively easy to see when we should quit doing something, such as eating the same tasteless cereal every morning. We need only consult our experience. But how will we discover that it’s time to quit not doing something, such as avoiding olives? Perhaps we would enjoy them now if only we tried them. But so long as we negatively persist, there’s nothing in our experience to tell us so.
Negative persistence is the mental structure underlying many phobias. Having once had a bad experience in a large crowd, or driving along a mountain road, or speaking before an audience, we avoid the object of our distress forever after. The initial experience may have been due to a unique confluence of factors. Other crowds, other roads, other audiences, or even the same ones on another day may not have affected us at all. But because we avoid them all, we’re not in a position to find out. Of course this problem is further compounded by the fact that our expectation of panic tends to act as a self-fulfilling prophecy. But that’s another trap.
If we refrain from an activity, how are we ever to know that its value has changed? The only answer is not to give up on anything for all time to come. It’s a good idea to cast an occasional glance at what we have excluded from our life because it’s too distasteful, painful, or difficult. Unbeknownst to us, our tastes, our courage, our abilities, our luck, or the world itself may have changed. An annual nibble at an olive or an intimate relationship may pay off handsomely in the end.
mplification is the trap of working harder than necessary to achieve our aim, as when we swat a fly with a sledgehammer. The opposite error of doing too little receives far more attention. But too much is also a mistake. There’s a certain amount of work appropriate to each of life’s tasks. If we do too little, we fall short of the goal. And if we do too much, we squander our resources.
A comparison with persistence will help to define the character of both traps. When we amplify, the end we are working toward remains valuable, but our work doesn’t advance us toward it. When we persist, our work may be superbly effective in moving us toward the end, but we have no reason for going there. We persist when we continue to play a game that has become tedious. We amplify when we take too long to move in a game that we still care about.
It’s amplificatory to rehearse a speech so often that our words become dull and lifeless, or to spend a hundred dollars to make the projection of our annual expenditures more precise by ten dollars, or to overpack for a trip because we wish to be prepared for the most unlikely contingencies—what if we’re invited to a formal ball in the midst of the Papuan jungle? Making more money than can be spent is an amplification that has consumed some lives in their entirety.
The mark of amplification is that the means exceed what is necessary to accomplish the end. Whether we are amplifying therefore depends on what we’re trying to accomplish. Making more money than we can spend is a trap if our aim is to be able to buy what we want. But the same activity may be fully in accord with our values if we engage in it for the pleasure of playing the money game. A man’s prolonging sexual foreplay longer than strictly necessary to ejaculate doesn’t count as amplification—unless his only interest is in reproduction. Even swatting a fly with a sledgehammer may be appropriate if we feel the need to exercise. On the other hand, it’s unlikely