I was trying to find a pattern behind the human irrational behaviour regarding certain things – status symbols, compulsive shopping, trying to acquire symbolism of achievement thinking it will result in the actual thing, trying to optimise decisions about even the smallest things and “win”… but what if there isn’t any?

What if the root of it all is profoundly irrational?

What if it’s merely an extension of childhood patterns that were never actually understood and replaced, and instead, one is trying to be “good”, to “please the parents”, in order to “win”?

What if people are unconsciously negotiating with some implicit, invisible parental figure, and trying to be successful in life by meeting some criteria – “look at me, I have all the wealth symbols, I’m successful, can I get approval now?”

Because, for them, somewhere, the parents are actually in charge of the world, and if they are pleased, everything will be all right. So, depending on what they think their parents are expecting of them, what the rules of the game are, they will try to win.

So, is the rule that the person with most money wins? Most status symbols? Most degrees and titles? Most fame? Stable income and predictable life? Joined the military and died protecting his country? Married and had children? Performed religious duties well? Because people don’t look like they are all playing the same game, and yet, strangely, they all are – they all try to gain approval, be good and successful; unless they are so broken they are completely self-destructive in their pathology.

Anti-religious people seem to try to use this form of behaviour to try and discredit all religion as a way of appeasing “sky daddy” of some kind, and yet, the connection of this behaviour with religion and its projection upon transcendence seems wholly incidental. The materialistic atheists manifest the same behaviour through different symbolism. The religious person will think that he with least unforgiven sins and most sacraments wins; an atheist will think that he with most offspring, control over most assets and with greatest reputation in society wins, but both are trying to check boxes in order to “win”.

Unfortunately, at no point do they seem to stop and think about what the fuck they are doing here; it’s all automatic, following an instinctual line of either pleasing the parent or rebelling in order to get attention. The irony is that they will devote an inordinate amount of effort to trying to “win” at the most insignificant things, such as buying the best dishwasher, camera, TV, watch or a car, where a rational bystander would notice that it doesn’t actually matter, because after getting to the point of “good enough”, the differences don’t actually gain you anything. Basically, after getting a watch that looks elegant, appropriate and not “tacky”, nobody really notices anything about it, and yet, people will invest incredible amounts of effort into it. It sounds irrational, and the first instinct is to try rational arguments, but what if it’s actually irrational to the point of complete disregard of all rationality? What if people are just following the invisible lines towards parental approval, or rebelling against imagined parental authority, and their entire existence is essentially sleepwalking, barely perceiving anything beyond trying to satisfy the limbic system of their brain that was conditioned somewhere in early childhood, to try to navigate parental approval?

There’s definitely lots of that everywhere – an endless effort to appease an invisible or imaginary parental authority in order to navigate the needs of your limbic system that is stuck somewhere in early childhood. But it’s not all I’m seeing. There are other motivating factors – respect and love, for instance. You don’t dress up for a special occasion because you seek approval, but because you respect the occasion and the people involved. You don’t treat your spouse well because you seek approval from your invisible parent; you do it because of love and respect.

I don’t buy myself expensive photo equipment in order to impress anyone; I do it because I understood that respect for my art form and craft requires it, and deliberately starving it of resources means disrespect, and if you disrespect your own work, how could you expect others to appreciate it? It’s a delicate dance between pathology and virtue, between self-contempt masquerading as asceticism, and overindulgence. It’s so easy to go overboard either way – do too much, or not enough, and the line of moderation might not actually be where you think it is.

I do, however, have one thing to recommend. Awareness. Know what you’re doing, and know why, and then it becomes very easy to find the correct course. Have your head in the game, and see the big picture of what you’re trying to do, and what methods you are choosing.

Now that we’re at it, I’m thinking about something else.

People often map the situation as having multiple choices, and you either win, or you learn on your mistakes. That’s not how it actually works. In reality, you learn in both cases, but the lesson you learn might actually be counterproductive.

For instance, you try something and you succeed immediately. You think it’s because it’s either easy or because you’re really competent. In essence, you can get a skewed understanding of how hard it actually is. Then, with your inflated sense of competence built on a streak of good fortune, you try something else, and you fail spectacularly. Then you reach all the wrong conclusions, because you are reluctant to admit that the initial success, which you built up your entire ego support structure over, was a complete fluke. Having learned all the wrong lessons, you make your next moves, which increase the level of disaster you are in. Eventually, if you’re stubborn enough, you are completely destroyed.

It doesn’t have to be a major issue. It might be something like buying your first used car, and you get lucky and it has no major issues, so you conclude that used cars are great and people who buy new are just stupid and it’s a waste of money. Then you buy your next used car based on your experience, and it turns to be an absolute shitbox. Your options are now to either stand there in surprise like a damn fool, or realise you were statistically too lucky with the first car, and you misunderstood the situation. It’s like running downstairs with scissors. Statistically, it’s a very bad idea, but the thing with statistics is that bad ideas usually take time to show themselves. You can do something ten times with no consequences, only to slip on the eleventh try and impale yourself on the scissors through your neck. You can then curse your bad luck, or realise that you were in fact inordinately lucky for the first ten times, and you drew all the wrong conclusions.

Similarly, I’ve seen women who have it too easy picking the ideal partner. Then they assume it’s the norm, get arrogant, ruin their relationship and then wonder how come they can never find anyone that good again.

Winning has a cost, and the cost is learning the wrong lessons from it. The Americans even have a word for it, “a winner”. A winner is a person in whose nature it is to win, and a loser is a person in whose nature it is to lose. That’s what learning wrong lessons looks like. You win, and you change your self-image, imagining yourself as a winner. It changes your confidence, it changes the way you view the world and others in it. You think you won because you’re just better, and those who lost are just worse. You don’t understand that it might be a statistical fluke, and you don’t want to understand it because it ruins your very pleasant self-image. You don’t want to understand that those who lost maybe did nothing wrong, because you like feeling no obligation to help them; after all, they are the losers, and you are the winner. And then your luck changes and your entire world falls apart.

Both sides of a choice have a cost. In both cases, you experience consequences and you learn. Sometimes, failing early can make you prudent, cautious and more strategic, leading to good long-term outcomes. Sometimes, there’s nothing worse that can happen to you than winning early.

I can immediately hear the objections to my thesis from the previous article.

What if closer scrutiny would reveal a serious problem with one of the choices? Well, if that were likely, people wouldn’t be bickering back and forth. It would be obvious that one choice is flawed, dangerous or whatever, and everybody would avoid it. But if it’s one of the most frequently bought options, and the most serious concerns with it are in the order of “I’m not sure I like the sound better than the other one”, be assured you’re not going to die from the consequences of a wrong choice.

But what if you are? I mean, going to die from the consequences? What if it’s actually serious, like choosing inadequate climbing equipment, or even worse, choosing inadequate mountaineering guides who get you killed? I don’t think the equation changes. If there are red flags, warnings, bad feeling about something, then by all means, heed those. If there’s no reason to assume something is wrong either way, then you simply don’t have enough information to make a choice, and the safest choice would probably be to do nothing until you are actually knowledgeable enough to be able to tell the difference between safe and dangerous. The choice, in this case, is to become more informed, because the current choice, where you can’t tell the difference, and the cost of choosing wrong is high, is a trap. It’s a situation you don’t want to be in.

So, we are introducing another element: experience, and how to attain it. The general advice would be to attain experience by doing something that has very small cost of choosing wrong, but allows you the opportunity of trial and error. An example of this is when you are a new driver, and you need to choose a car, but you don’t know anything about cars, except that they cost lots of money, and you’re not sure what you should buy, because you don’t want to either waste money or choose a car that’s bad for you.

My advice would be to choose the most common model in the price range you can afford, and then try it and see if there’s anything wrong with it that you can immediately notice. If there is, your experimentation already yielded a datapoint for you, so you’re no longer at the starting position where you don’t know anything. At some point, you need to pick an option based on imperfect knowledge, and just gain more experience, and that will allow you to make a more informed choice.

It’s common for total beginners to be unreasonable with their demands, because they don’t know what they’re doing. For instance, they want a car that can do anything, because they have no idea about what they are going to use it for, and they don’t want to reduce their options. It’s the same with photography – the total beginners want a camera/lens that can do “everything”, and they end up putting a 14-500mm f/1.4 lens on their wish list, because who knows what they’ll end up taking pictures of. The experienced photographers, on the other hand, will know what they are doing and how it’s done, and their choices will be much more narrowed down – for instance, between a 50mm and a 35mm lens for street photography. So, basically, experience with doing a thing gives you enough knowledge to make more informed choices, which, on the other hand, means that you by definition have to make initial choices based on insufficient experience, and gather experience from errors. But if those errors are expensive, it might be a bad idea to make them at all; it means you’re probably going in over your head too quickly and you should revise your approach. For instance, if you think about taking up mountaineering, trying Mt. Everest or K2 as your first ascent is definitely a bad idea and you’re likely to be killed. Try something easy, and with an expert guide. Then, as you know more, increase difficulty. I’ve seen all sorts of cases where people get killed by going cave diving or climbing mountains when their experience level is insufficient for the task, and honestly, insufficient for assessing what the problems will be.

So, understand that my previous article relates to the simple choices where the worst outcome is a waste of time and energy spent in considering it. For instance, if you choose a laptop that’s not ideal for you, what’s going to be the cost of that decision? You’ll have a laptop that’s too big, too small, too slow or looks like a toy. The price of that choice is very small, and you can afford to make mistakes in order to learn. Buy based on what you know, because wasting time reading other people’s opinions without any experience isn’t going to help at that point. You need to buy something and live with it for a while. If it’s good, great. if it’s not good, it will slightly suck but you’re not going to die. It’s not like choosing a shitty car that’s going to get you killed, or choosing to go SCUBA diving in a cave. If you’re choosing headphones, the worst outcome is going to be that they will have an inferior sound, or break too easily. It’s not like you’re going hitchhiking in some wasteland and end up with your throat slit and in a ditch. So, if the cost of choosing wrong is small, treat it as a learning opportunity – if you choose wrong, based on that experience the next time you’ll know better. If, however, the cost of choosing wrong is high, you are probably pushing yourself into something too soon, and you need to learn more gradually in order to avoid really serious consequences.

Also, sometimes choices make themselves, and the way you frame the dilemma is indicative. For instance, if your question is “why would I waste all that money on a camera when a smartphone takes great pictures”, the answer is to stick to the smartphone, because if you don’t see why you should buy a system camera, you likely shouldn’t. If you know exactly what a system camera will do for you, and the question is between Canon, Nikon and Sony, the choice also makes itself – you know enough to narrow down your choice, and whichever of the three you end up choosing, it will likely be fine, and if not, you will get more experience to be able to tell why something else would be better, as a future choice.

It’s similar with other matters – if you don’t know which of the five good looking girls is right for you, the answer is that you need to find out more. Maybe none of them, and maybe the answer will become obvious when you talk to them. In any case, there’s only so much you can do at a certain level of experience, and you need to change it.

The problem remains the same with the most serious issues, like religion. If your question is why even bother with religion when there’s so many interesting things in the world, the question itself already defines what your answer is going to be. On the other hand, if the question is why waste time with the worldly things when they are ephemeral and illusory and God is the only thing that matters, the question already implies the answer.

Choice paralysis indicates that either you don’t have enough information to make the right choice, or that there isn’t a right choice to make, for instance between hazelnut and chocolate ice cream. In essence, if you don’t know which one you’d like, pick any, and the next time pick the other one. Sometimes you just have to make mistakes, and sometimes you need to make the costly ones, but agonizing over choice when you obviously don’t have any rational or experiential basis for making it doesn’t in itself improve your position.