Little Illusions
There are infinitely many little illusions that allow us to live our everyday lives as organized, social creatures.
In fact most of what you perceive every day is not individual bits of information — it’s a combination of simplifications, heuristics, and illusions. If you had to think about every little thing you saw every day, you’d get almost nothing done. You’d spend all your time processing sensory data.
Some of these illusions reduce uncertainty, which is extremely important for humans. We cannot stand uncertainty, and we will do just about anything to trick ourselves out of experiencing it.
And some of the illusions are meant to simplify the world so that we can take only the simplest, largest inputs into our decision-making. Some of them are social and psychological survival mechanisms.
One example of a deeply psychological illusion is the peak-end rule. This rule states that we remember an event or a situation by its best or worst point (the peak), and by how we felt at the end.
If you had a terrible week with nothing but bad luck, but during that week you got promoted and then that week ended with your favorite activity, you’re far more inclined to remember it as a good week than a bad one. Even though that doesn’t reflect your actual experience during almost the entire thing. This phenomenon is equally strong (or even stronger) when turning a memory into a bad or sour one.
Some of our illusions are fascinating, some useful, and some utterly ridiculous. Here are some more illusions that I think are fun and interesting.
Clothing, when used effectively, is an illusion. It’s a trick to keep you from seeing people as mammals. And it either works as an illusion, or it doesn’t.
When you see a 50-year-old man in a nice, snug t-shirt and jeans that fit well, it looks normal to you. You don’t spend any energy thinking about his clothing — it’s background information.
But when that same man wears one of those boxy, thick old band t-shirts that hangs stiffly 7 inches away from his back, the illusion falls apart. He looks like a naked mammal trying on clothes. Like a chimp wearing a person costume. The clothing is no longer an irrelevant part of the background; now your eyes see it. And now you’re thinking about his belly, and the wind touching the skin on his back, and whether his belt is holding up his pants far enough to hide his underwear, and why anyone still even makes clothing out of this awful material. I mean, it’s 2023. Why do we still have burlap t-shirts.
Clothing is less about style or color and more about shapes. Good shapes in clothing allow you to use these illusions in your favor. Either to look good, or to keep your body out of the question entirely — to push your body into the background. That’s an interesting strategy. A good strategy.
Sometimes you have to accept illusions to be entertained or to believe in a story.
In action movies, basic biology and physiology are ignored completely. Every time you watch some action heroes work their way through the enemy compound or the underground bunker or the secret warehouse, what do they do? They knock everyone out with a series of kicks and punches. And then, for some reason, those barely-touched enemies stay unconscious for the rest of the movie and never bother the heroes again. Action heroes are apparently capable of delivering surgically-precise mini-comas on demand.
But of course the alternative is worse. We can’t just have the action heroes walk in with guns and take everyone’s lives. Because that would be needlessly gory and would paint an entirely different picture of morality in the movie.
So what we’re left with is that filmmakers are forced to install an absurd illusion and we are forced to believe it just so that we can watch the movie. We know that people don’t get knocked out for 45 minutes by a punch to the stomach, but absurdity is the price we pay to be entertained. And that’s why our minds automate those illusions. Or at least they try to.
A car is an illusion. When your car is in good shape and everything is working, it is an object you sit in and operate. It’s a vehicle; it’s one usable object.
But when it breaks down or something stops working, your car stops being a car. It stops being one object. It becomes a web of viciously complicated systems and machines, most of which you can’t even name, let alone describe in function. And then you don’t know how to turn this mess, this puzzle, back into a car. And panic sets in.
So you hire a mechanic. And his job isn’t just to fix a system or a machine — it’s to give you back your “car” illusion. So that you can trust and rely on the car again. So that it can go from being a system of complicated nonsense back to being one object with definite purpose.
And, when you’re driving a car, there’s another illusion at work. The car becomes an extension of your own body. It becomes part of the way you physically identify yourself in space. This sensory illusion helps you navigate the world efficiently and safely. It’s a useful trick.
And this is also, I think, one of the reasons that driving brings out the absolute worst in human beings. Because it’s a physically unsafe activity that can be invasive and high-pressure. It’s an activity that puts people into each other’s physical space. It’s like when someone at a bank stands too close behind you, but magnified to 70 miles per hour and possible death. Personal space, although somewhat an illusion itself, is extremely important to us. It represents safety and independence.
Human beings evolved to incorporate vast amounts of illusions into our everyday cognition. Like, for instance, personal space.
Or, for instance, human beings quite literally evolved not to think individually. We evolved to think as parts of a collective (a hunting tribe, a village, a team). Given the choice between thinking independently and thinking for social survival, we tend to choose social survival. And all the while, we will convince ourselves that it’s our own thoughts we’re obeying.
You see this in politics, of course. That’s the most obvious example. And you see it in high school friend circles, like in the movie Mean Girls, or in matters of artistic taste. A person can convince himself he likes country music if he thinks that keeping his current friends relies on his liking country music. And most of the time he won’t even notice that he’s fooled himself. Only later on will he think “man, I never really even liked that.”
Have you ever had one of those days where you’re sitting around alone, and start thinking about how happy your ex made you? And how happy it would make you if they’d just text you and apologize for everything and want to come be nice to you?
That’s a trick too. Your mind wants you to suddenly forget how unsatisfying the relationship was. You know better, but it feels nice to entertain those thoughts for a few minutes. So you do it anyway. Few things produce illusions like loneliness. Loneliness will make you sell your own values up the river just to have somebody to fight with. We fool ourselves into thinking something bad is better than nothing. Because our bodies don’t want us to be alone. We’re programmed to hate it.
Like we said about the peak-end rule, it’s easy for our memories to fool us. To ruin something that was once great, or to polish up something that was no good and show it to us again.
One of the biggest (but most important) challenges in life is overcoming your own biology — that is, making conscious choices that go directly against what you’re internally programmed to do. After all, biology is not there to help you think critically or love yourself properly. It’s there to make you survive and reproduce.
Clever people know their own illusions. And in some cases, they embrace them. Like in the case of driving, or being entertained, or digesting a good but unrealistic story. And in other cases they actively combat them. Like in the case of beliefs, taste, and relationships.
Drink some water and fool thyself not.
JDR
“The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office.” - Robert Frost