We all have our causes. Henry Heimlich was determined to teach the world that you can save a choking victim with abdominal thrusts. I want to convince the world to eat unseasoned vegetables, help irksome strangers, and do eccentric thought exercises.
. . . and many other things. Here are ten insights I feel a need to impress on the world somehow.
Take my pleadings as seriously as you like. I’ve written in greater detail about some of these points already, and will elaborate on the others eventually.
1. Your shopping cart doesn’t need to go wherever you go.
This is a minor point, but most people don’t seem to know this. You do not have to wheel your cart right up to every item you want to buy at the grocery store. The cart is a bin with wheels, not a car. If there’s any appreciable cart traffic, you can park it in an out of the way place, then fetch any nearby items much quicker on foot. It’s seldom necessary to navigate a two hundred pound cargo bin down an aisle choked with other carts, just because a few items on your list are in that aisle. Gather on foot, move around the store with the cart. This method ensures you never need to block anyone from accessing anything or passing by, and will almost never have to wait behind someone else who is doing that. Treat the cart like a mothership rather than a truck.
2. Societies are better when liberals and conservatives keep each other in check.
Liberalism and conservatism are two types of thinking virtually all humans can understand. We can all appreciate the value of openness to new ideas and ways of life, while also recognizing the value of preserving what’s good and questioning radical changes. Encouraged by simplistic media narratives, people tend to identify with one and demonize the other, and regard their favored perspective as the way everything must be viewed all the time. That’s a mistake. When one principle pushes the other to the margins, you get the worst societies ever. Society will only be improved by people who can keep both these perspectives in their head at once.
3. Exercise is the magic bullet.
As I ranted about recently, the benefits of regular vigorous exercise are the equivalent of a magical pill with dozens of benefits, including a longer life, improved confidence, increased attractiveness, better mood, and better sleep. It works better than any other interventions we know of for those and other ailments, and the cost is reasonable: a few hours of manual labor per week. We’re always looking for magic bullets. This is the magic bullet. It’s here. It’s reliable. It’s available to all. Don’t live life without taking advantage.
4. Humans want everything to be someone’s fault.
The human mind always wants a culprit. Misfortunes like traffic jams don’t just happen — they’re always the fault of bad drivers, bad city planners, suburban homeowners, or road crews that work too slow. Humans really don’t want to confront the fact that suffering is inevitable. It’s much easier for us to bear pain or inconvenience when we can convince ourselves that it only occurs due to bad actors, rather than the complex and blameless physics of life. This urge to attribute bad things to bad people is probably some natural quirk of human psychology. It seems that we mostly trust this impulse, and we rarely talk about it. Ironically, it is a quirk very easily exploited by bad actors who want to harness your pain and direct your outrage toward their adversaries.
5. Three meals a day is probably excessive for many people.
Someone has convinced the Western world that we have some biological need to eat every five hours, even as the majority of the population is suffering from illnesses caused by overconsumption. Everyone seems to believe they will collapse into complete dysfunction and suffering if they don’t eat at all the customary times. In my experience, “missed meal” pangs don’t last more than a few minutes, have nothing to do with the body’s nutritional needs, and don’t happen at all after a few days of not eating at that particular time. There’s no way the human body is meant to always be digesting.
6. The “lived” in “short-lived” rhymes with “dived.”
Nobody I know says it that way, but they’re all wrong. The “lived” part of “short-lived” is derived from the noun “life” — it is not the past tense of the verb “to live.” The word short-lived describes a thing that has, or had, a short life, not something that “lived shortly.” It’s the same adjective-noun formation as “curly-haired” or “gold-plated.” Just as something that has a short life is “short-lived,” someone who has a short knife could be described as “short-knived,” and someone with a short wife “short-wived.” I know this argument is somewhat of a lost cause — it’s one of those cases where overwhelming misuse has made it acceptable. Pedantry aside, I think most people who use this term would want to know. The discussions around the topic are interesting in any case.
7. Restricting speech only helps the people in power.
I know many smart people who believe punishing “harmful” speech helps to defend vulnerable minorities. They’re being played like a fiddle. Make no mistake: it will always be the people in power who ultimately decide what speech is allowable. They will restrict it in a way that serves them, and to the degree to which the public lets them. The compassion of misguided activists is being exploited by the powerful to undermine the most basic recourse disempowered populations still have: the right to say what they think is true. Curtailing speech, whether through law or social taboo, consolidates power like nothing else, as every authoritarian regime has shown us. Many well-meaning people who believe they’re “fighting the power” are actually handing them the keys.
8. Religion is not “ancient superstition.”
The great religions caught on because they successfully communicated something vital about the human condition to a large number of people. Their founders are probably some of the wisest and most insightful people our species ever generated. The ignorance of some followers of religious traditions (and of most detractors of religion), no matter how many, do not make those traditions nonsense. Hardline atheists and hardline fundamentalists make the same mistake when they regard religious texts as collections of factual claims, rather than instructive works of literature. There’s so much there for the inquisitive person, and nothing for the know-it-all.
9. We take morality very seriously but make moral judgments very flippantly.
Virtually everything people argue about is a moral issue — what’s right and what’s wrong, who’s a good or bad person, who deserves to be voted off the island, et cetera. There’s nothing people care more about than morality, yet we make moral judgments in seconds, and seldom doubt them or entertain multiple conclusions. We act as though most questions of right and wrong are no-brainers even when half the population utterly disagrees with us. That’s because moral intuition and moral reasoning are completely different mental processes, which evolved for different purposes. Our intuitions — our snap-judgments—are survival reflexes that help us form coalitions with others to keep ourselves safe. Moral reasoning is a much newer capacity, and it’s very hard to do while your reptile brain is terrified to question a popular idea, or agree with an unpopular person. A basic understanding of that dynamic could make us all a little less crazy.
10. You can‘t ruminate and listen at the same time.
The tendency of the modern human is to live in their head — almost perpetually monologuing and forecasting and rehashing. This is a seldom-helpful habit most of us reinforce constantly by tumbling along with its momentum. You can weaken the grip of the ruminative mind by frequently taking a few seconds to be quiet and listen to your surroundings. Doing this reveals something interesting: when you actively use your attention for listening (or in any other intentional way) it cannot be used for more rumination. Each time you do this, the gravity of the monologuing mind weakens. If even a fraction of the population learned how to perforate their ongoing ruminative thought-mill like this, it might be a different world.
Not everyone will agree with all the above diatribes, and that’s the point — we have to make our cases to each other.
I’d be interested to hear what you’d like to convince our species of, especially if it’s somewhat eccentric. Let us know in the comments.
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Do you like Raptitude?
Do you think some of the ideas on this site are worth employing in real life?
Then you’d probably be into this: we’re doing the Raptitude Field Trip for a second time. A group of readers and I are going to try out some classic Raptitude practices, then discuss how it went on the message board.
It’s a mini-course you can do on any online device. It’s easy and inexpensive, and will give you seven perspective-giving tools you can use for the rest of your life.
There’s still a few days to sign up.
[What is the Raptitude Field Trip?]
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The field trip was exactly what I needed to lift me out of a mini-slump. Each session was unique, easy to understand, and powerful in its simplicity.
-Rebecca, Mount Vernon, WA
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Photos by Jezael Melgoza, Alfred Kenneally, Thomas Evans, NOAA, Abdul Ahad Shiekh, Alessandro Bellone; others public domain
