I was thinking about my next thought experiment last night. It is a simple but profound one. Imagine yourself in a situation, maybe with a friend, talking to a superior, shopping or planning your next life changing decision. Think about what you would normally do in this situation. Then think about what you would do in that situation if you had no sense of fear.
When I find the actions of myself and my friends predictable it is only because I have gotten acquainted with what scares us. Knowing what scares someone allows one to accurately predict their reaction to a situation... but I think you'll find as I did after running that thought experiment through your mind a few times to its logical conclusion that the end result is extremely unpredictable and even suicidal in behaviour.
But it is interesting, yes? Just how many of our decisions in life are made out of love (in this sense our desire to do something we personally believe in) and how many are made out of fear (in this sense our desire to manage our insecurities)?
I have developed this model of insecurity management vs creative adventurism to explain human decision making.
Insecurity management is about making decisions to placate our fears relating to death, harm, loss, rejection, ostracism and uncertainty. These fears could be real, such as avoiding walking across a floor covered in glass shards with bare feet, or they could be imaginary, such as fearing that someone is telepathically reading your mind. I personally think purely imaginary fears are quite rare and the vast number of fears people have do have a rational basis. What I'm far more concerned with is over expressed fears. That is fears we respect even though the consequences of ignoring them are next to harmless or less severe than if we did otherwise.
Self-consciousness is a good example of this. A person may fear that they have a physical defect, which honestly, we all have physical defects so that is a rational fear, so they avoid social interaction because they're afraid of people not accept them because of it. While it is quite distressing to realise that you might have a physical defect that limits your enjoyment of life compared to other people, the consequences of fearing that other people will reject you and thus avoiding social interaction altogether are far more harmful than ignoring that fear.
Just to clarify I'm being very broad in my definition of physical defects in the above paragraph, I'm including beauty spots, facial assymetries along with more serious ones like heart and kidney defects. Defects that make us less than perfectly beautiful are present in everyone and the source of much anxiety for most people - even though they are hardly life threatening by themselves. They are far more dangerous when we over express our fear about their impact on our lives.
Pushing against insecurity management is creative adventurism. This is our desire to explore new experiences. New romances, deeper connections with existing relationships, new hobbies, new interests, new ways of doing the same thing. Basically our desire to be creative and inventive. From fixing a squeaky gate to changing our career. This is our desire to grow, explore and live.
This sounds really beautiful, and it is because this is where we get our enjoyment out of life. Pushing new frontiers. This is what makes life worth living.
It is also the biggest source of insecurity in our lives.
It is the source of our desire to put ourselves into harm's way, it is our desire to stop an abuser, it is our desire to risk our friendships and money for something that very likely will not be worth the cost of losing that money or those friends. It is our desire to challenge our society, parents and leaders... which might lead to greater freedom, happiness and prosperity... or to brutal and fatal retaliation from them. Making the first move into unexplored territory is always the scariest venture. Even if just for the risk of putting in weeks, months or years of effort into a project, book or relationship only to find it leads nowhere.
So... insecurity management is important... it keeps us safe, and our lives stable and predictable. But it doesn't make us happy either.
Then there's creative adventurism which offers us all the thrills and excitement of living. But it just might kill/destroy/harm us in the quest for a better life.
Clearly the two sides of this see-saw need to be in balance somehow. We need to work on our insecurities and discover if we over express them or if we have too many that they cripple our ability to enjoy life. Sometimes we need to look at our desire to challenge and attack the status quo and ask if you're investing your time in a rebellious act that is actually helping yourself, your friends and your community... or just creating new problems for them?
This is all about becoming less ignorant about why one does certain things so that we can both be more productive and enjoy our lives more.
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Creative adventurism? That is an interesting way to put it. For the most part I agree with this, however I think it's important to make a distinction between decisions made in the absence of fear and those in rejection of it. How different is the rewarding feeling of doing something you simply want to do against that you have concurred fear to do? An issue I've always found with the ideas of balance is the danger of falling into that grey area of emotion if it does truely work.
ReplyDeleteI have to agree with you there, Charlotte. I didn't talk about that in this particular entry but I hope to develop this idea in the next few posts. Emotions are the key to everything, our intelligence depends on them and the quality of our intelligence depends on our self-knowledge of why we feel the way we do. Many people act on emotions without understanding how they reached that feeling in the first place. However, they would tell you that they acted voluntarily... but to someone with more self-knowledge is more likely to say they feel pushed into behavioring in a certain way, and finally a person with great self-knowledge will have the choice whether to act or not act on their emotions.
ReplyDeleteI think of it like a piano, without self-knowledge one only has a few keys but as we grow in understanding of why we feel the way we do, new keys are added to the keyboard. With each new key the number of songs (i.e. actions) we can take increases. Eventually we cease sounding like brutal clash of coarse notes and mature into a masterpiece what can be played in concert with many other instruments.
The lonely drum beating out of time and out of tune evolves into an orchestra (i.e. in harmony with ones friends and family).