While waiting for the girls in the city, I sat down for a cup of tea in a café and couldn't help but overhear the conversation of the couple next to me. I normally don't eavesdrop, but they were talking about which restaurant they could try in the city - and they both had Australian accents. So after recommending a restaurant that was close by, we spent the next 45 minutes talking about life and the differences between Finland and Australia in prices and things like housing. The guy had bought a house twenty years ago in a crappy area close to Sydney, and now it is an affluent area and worth around four million dollars. A sight more than he paid for it back in the day. And Sydney has always been expensive.
But the world is different now.
The worse we feel, the more we spend.
This was the premise for my last article looking at market behaviours. But there are other implications than just further enriching the zero point one percent, because what we buy and what we consume, distracts us from actually dealing with many of the issues that we need to deal with. People end up feeling they "know" what is going on in the world, but really all they know is where they have put their attention to consume more rhetoric designed to lull them off to sleep, and dream about their intellectual prowess.
But their intellect is repeating what the algorithm fed them.
Like reading the answer from a calculator screen, without knowing what went into making it and therefore, not knowing what it means, or whether it is right or not. People feel that they know what is happening in the world, because they read about the world from sources that they believe are reputable -without questioning whether they can be trusted or not. And when a source makes its money from providing information of a certain type to make the buyer feel like they are knowledgeable, there is a lot of room for bending the truth.
For example, friends of ours were also visiting the city today and we sat down for an hour together talking about stuff. My friend is head of finance at a pharmaceutical and stays up to date with the current finance information. He cited the top finance magazine and how they have been predicting that in six months from now the housing market will recover. Yet, they have been predicting this for six months for the last four years. Eventually they will be right, but the problem is that they do not cite any reasons why the housing market will recover and, they are ignoring all the indicators as to what drives that recovery - like unemployment rates.
The unemployment rate in Finland is at 10.5 percent.
And increasing. Companies are laying off more people and those who are losing their jobs are knowledge workers who have been earning well up until this point. But when people lose their jobs, they don't say -
"Time to buy a better house!"
But my friend, still reads the magazine. Because a lot of the information he reads from it, he agrees with. He feels smarter for reading it and gets a sense of superiority when he agrees with what is being said, and a sense of superiority when he disagrees.
He wins either way.
You see, we like to feel knowledgeable, but we don't let a little thing like having bad knowledge get in the way of our feelings. We also don't like to put in too much effort, so we don't dig deeper to discover if what we are agreeing with is actually correct, we assume it is, because we agree. And we also assume we are correct when we disagree, so what we are actually doing, is not entertaining if we are wrong. We think our feelings infallible.
We can have all the data in the world at our fingertips, but it is us who make sense of it and give it meaning. Even if we don't really know how to connect the dots, or even what we are looking at, we are very likely not going to let that get in the way of us feeling knowledgeable. We will regurgitate what we think we know with confidence, relying on us hearing it from some source that we assume is knowledgeable enough to rely on.
We can't validate it.
We just aren't that smart, across enough topics to be knowledgeable in them all. So while we might pick holes in one frame, we will have to accept another. But if what we know had holes, why do we assume that the same source will know about what we don't know?
You know?
It gets confusing. And that is before all of the other mess gets dumped on top, with political manoeuvring trying to convince us that their cause is actually in support of our values, and marketing and lobbying looking to get us to consume more and more for the profit of others.
The world is different, because we are behaving differently than we used to behave. We used to be more conscientious of our domains, our knowledge and skill, and had to apply them in order to interact with life. Now, we are able to use a host of tools to provide us the answers, and support our personal views so we don't have to feel the sting of being wrong.
Have you noticed that no one is wrong anymore?
Sure, we are often wrong, but we needn't admit it because no matter what we say or do, there is some tool that will support our position that we can cite as the truth. The worst people on earth are able to justify their actions and when they can't, are able to blame others for their behaviour instead of take responsibility for themselves.
They made me do it!
It is interesting that in a world where we claim to be science and data driven, we put so much faith in our feelings that are triggered by information that can't be trusted.
There is what we know. And then there is reality.
I thought that would be a quote from someone smarter than me... but according to a quick search, it seems I said it first in that way. It would be pretty cool if that is the case. Perhaps it will make me a trusted source of information.
Taraz [ Gen1: Hive ]
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