Mental Traps_ The Overthinker's Guide to a Happier Life - Andre Kukla [8]
We make all our preparations for a trip. We pack, arrange for the feeding of pets and the watering of plants, disconnect the telephone, make sure that the faucets are shut, lock the windows and the doors … Everything has been attended to. But perhaps there’s something we’ve overlooked. Perhaps we’ve forgotten to pack the toothbrushes. So we review our arrangements one by one: toothbrushes, pets, plants, windows, doors … But we can as well commit an oversight the second time around as the first. The situation remains essentially unchanged. Thus if we were inclined to review our arrangements before, we’re going to be equally inclined to do so now: toothbrushes, pets, plants, windows, doors … Again and again we are returned to the same starting point. We drive off to the airport with our thoughts running along the same endless circle: toothbrushes, pets, plants, windows, doors … toothbrushes, pets, plants, windows, doors …
The rationalization of repetition is that with each time around we diminish the probability of error. Now this is undoubtedly true in some cases. The chance of making an arithmetical error is considerably reduced if we repeat the calculation and obtain the same result a second time. Even so, we have to take the law of diminishing returns into account. Every review of our work adds less to our confidence than the previous one. Whether it’s worthwhile to review ten times, once, or not at all evidently depends on the cost of conducting the review in comparison to its ever-diminishing benefit. Before we go over a hundred canceled checks a second time to reconcile an eleven-cent discrepancy in our balance, we might ask ourselves whether we would be willing to reconcile someone else’s checkbook for the payment of eleven cents. If not, it might be wiser to subtract the sum from our balance and find something more valuable to do.
Moreover, it isn’t always true that every repetition diminishes uncertainty, even by a hair’s breadth. Often we already have the highest degree of certainty that is humanly attainable. In that case, repetition accomplishes nothing at all. For example, if our enterprise involves more than a few steps, it’s impossible to perceive all the stages of the work at once. When we turn to selecting the toiletries for our trip, the clothes we’ve packed are no longer before us. We have to rely on our memory that when we did attend to the clothes, we judged that phase of the work to be complete. If now we try to recapture the certainty of immediate perception by reviewing the earlier stage of the work, we simply lose sight of the later stage. The greatest attainable certainty is already reached when we recall that we once judged the other stages of the work to be done. We can no longer have the direct evidence of our senses to make this judgment now. But there’s nothing to be done about it. No amount of shuttling back and forth between the earlier and the later stages of the work will diminish our residual uncertainty.
Nor will it help to write everything down or to have someone follow us everywhere with a video camera. For what has been written or videotaped can be read or viewed only one item at a time. By the time we get to the last items, the first ones will already be out of mind. We are therefore back to where we started, relying on our recollection that everything seemed to be in order when it was before us. Making a list may help us to achieve this maximum of attainable confidence. But if we have it already and make a list in the hope of arriving closer to the certainty of immediate