Tag Archives: psychology

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“As If” I Were Blogging

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It’s often surprising to me that I’m not more artistically inclined. I had a great great uncle who was a cartoonist by trade. But apparently that gene was recessive or something because I didn’t get it. It’s strange though because I like to oversimplify my life into snapshots. You would think I would make a natural photographer. My close friends chide me for this. I do it with just about everything. It’s part of the reason why I crush so hard. (I haven’t really brought this up before, but I do, in fact, crush hard.) I latch on to a specific moment or a specific picture of a girl, and I construct a whole ideal and romantic story surrounding that moment or picture. It’s not entirely based on reality.

It’s not surprising, then, that I’ve always had a very definite picture in my head of my adult life. Now don’t laugh. It sounds idyllic and stereotypical and stuff, but it’s all that I really want.

This is what future me looks like. It's not a golden retriever, but everything else is pretty spot on.

I have an image of me age 30 or so. Back when I was still in high school this picture involved me being taller, maybe 5’10” or something, but at this point, I don’t think that’s going to happen. But I am a little more filled out. 30-year-old me is a regular attendee at his gym. He’s not body builder big but he’s got arms bigger than pencils. He has short hair and his skin is clear. He’s clean shaven. He’s wearing a flannel. It’s brisk outside, and he’s in the middle of a field. It’s fall and on all sides of the field are tees that are changing color. Some of the leaves are falling into the field. And there’s a golden retriever. And that dog loves 30-year-old me. And that’s it. That’s my picture of the future.

I like to live “as if” this future is true. It certainly seems attainable. This guy Hans Vaihinger constructed a whole philosophy around this “as if” thing in the 1930s. He said that because we can’t ever really know for sure what’s going on, we behave “as if” our constructs of the world are true. The psychologist Alfred Adler thought that we develop psychological problems when the “as if” of our constructs doesn’t match up with what’s really going on.

The thing about the snapshots is that they contain a lot more than they appear to. In my picture of the future, I know that the flannel-wearing 30-year-old is a good man. He cares about a lot of people, and they all know that he cares about him. Maybe he has kids who he wisely teaches. Maybe he has a wife who he loves selflessly. Maybe he has a career where he influences a lot of people or maybe he has a career where he gets to have close relationships with a few really awesome people. But I know he’s good. I know that he reads a lot, watches old movies, goes to concerts, and hasn’t played a video game since college. I know that he writes. I know that he loves God and wisely shows it.

It’s interesting because I know that he has all of these traits. I don’t perceive him “as if” he has all of these traits.

In philosophy 101 one of the first things you learn is the “is-ought” fallacy. It says that we cannot get morality or normative claims directly from descriptions of the world. Just because there is violence in the world, for instance, doesn’t mean there should be.  I think Vaihinger’s “as if” is more a descriptive than a normative claim. It’s no secret that most people act “as if” the world they have created is true.  But I don’t think it’s the way it has to be or even should be. What if, instead of acting as if I would one day become that person in my picture of the future, I knew that I am that person?

What are you acting “as if” is reality that you could be making a reality instead?

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A Nickel and Two Pennies for Your Thoughts

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Only 7% of what people glean when they listen to us is verbal. That’s staggering. It’s life-changing. It’s monumental. It means that someone who never talks could, hypothetically, be 93% as effective a communicator as someone who talks.

Albert Mehrabian, in the 1960s, ran a bunch of experiments and discovered that humans make emotional and value-laden judgments based almost solely on non-verbal cues. We don’t really care what a person is saying so long as they are saying it in a nice tone and confidently and while leaning in a bit and while making eye contact.

I suppose this is something rhetoricians, politicians, and pick-up artists have known for quite some time. But we don’t really like rhetoricians, politicians, and pick-up artists. We lump them in with used-car salesmen. They are slimy and tricky and deceitful. The devil probably is the  smoothest being in the world. I wrote a story once where the devil was a man in a white suit. He looked a little bit like James Stewart. He sounded like your father and patted you on the back like an old friend. That’s the only way I can understand the devil.

I think it’s easy to start thinking that people who are more concerned with the 93% non-verbal cues are just intrinsically crafty. But rhetoricians, politicians, pick-up artists, used-car salesmen, and the devil aren’t slimy and crafty because they care about that 93% but because they are using that 93% to sell lies.

What would it look like, I wonder, if we started to use that 93% to love and in truth. We tell people all the time that we love them. We tell our friends, our family, that guy who just gave up his seat in class so that you and I can sit next to each other. And most of the time people don’t believe us. And why should they? “I love you” only makes up 7% of what they are hearing. But what if, every time we told someone we loved them, we lowered our voice a little, looked them straight in the eye, leaned forward, and touched them on the shoulder? What if every confession of love was made to seem like a secret? What if every compliment, every favor, every piece of encouragement was delivered like the most private and personal and valuable of statements? It would be staggering. It would be life-changing. It would be monumental.

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Freudian Thoughts

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Sigmund Freud

I really dig psychology. I’m taking a Psychology of Personality class this quarter for my psychology minor. And I’m loving it. It’s a two-hour lecture class, and typically these kinds of classes rarely hold my interest, especially when you can typically read all of the information in the textbook, but I am enamored by this course. We are working our way through the history of psych of personality, and so, like all good psychology, we start with Freud.

Freud was a pretty interesting fellow. He wrote a lot of stuff that people took to be really sexual and stuff when it kind of really wasn’t. Also, he didn’t write about women very much because they were a “dark continent” and he “never really understood them.” And for those reasons, Freud is usually written off as a crazy person. It’s sad, though, because while people don’t think Freud was right about everything anymore, he certainly got some stuff right or said some things about the world that are useful.

Freud had this one really interesting theory about child development. Without going into too much detail, Freud thought that we all go through the same stages of development and that during these stages of development we are obsessed with different erogenous zones. Erogenous zones is just a fancy way of saying parts of the body that give us pleasure. So first, we are obsessed with the mouth. And that’s all good, we get food that way and that makes us happy. Then we go into the anal stage, which has to do with potty training, and then the phallic stage, which has to do with discovering our genitals and so on and so forth.

So basically the whole thing goes that when we are in each stage, we don’t really know about the next stage so we think that the happiness and pleasure we are experiencing from our current stage is the greatest of all the happiness and pleasure we will ever experience. And it’s like, obviously there are greater pleasures than being fed. But when a baby is in the oral stage, everything has to do with the mouth. All objects pass through the mouth because when the mouth is your pleasure center, if something doesn’t work with your mouth, it’s no good for you. If we could just tell all babies that there are greater pleasures than mouth pleasures, then we could fix the whole babies choking on things problem.

Us adults exist in the genital stage, where we have supposedly realized that reproduction causes the greatest pleasure. But this whole notion kind of strikes me as odd, as if there is some end point to development – that one day, we wake up and if everything had gone perfectly from birth, we would be perfect adults. That doesn’t seem right to me. I think we kind of go on developing, and I think that’s why sex permeates our culture in a lot of ways. If we believe, like the baby with his mouth, that the end-all be-all of human existence is sex, then of course we are going to put it everywhere and in everything.  I wish someone would tell us that there are greater pleasures than reproductive pleasures.