Why does it seem we always act against our happiness?

Huuuh! I think this is going to be long, but I hope I can make it worth reading...Well, I have just finished a superb book from author J.D. Trout called The Empathy Gap. This has made me think a lot about many issues that impact every one's life, such as the role that the surroundings have in the majority of decisions that we make and that ultimately shape ours and other people's fates.

A major emphasis is placed on a logical fallacy that we all (at least in the majority of western societies) posses, an almost sacred but unrealistic characteristic called free will. The concept of free will holds the romantic idea that we, as individuals, have the power of choosing what we want to do, exactly the way we want it, when we want it and that ultimately shape the road of our lives. With this being said, the idea basically tells us that whatever happens in our lives, good or bad, is due to the way in which we execute that power. Some societies stress this factor with more importance than others.

The truth is, if you think about it, we are really not that free, putting it in Trout's own words "We are just as free aswe can, not as free as we want". The thing is, the environmet in which we grow up, in which we carry on with our daily activities, the policies that govern us, natural disasters, weather, language, demographics, our parents, etc, all have a tremendous impact in the way we have been shaped as human beings, much more than what we want to admit, and therefore, in the way we function (or malfunction) as a society. The problem is -or rather the problems are- that we are so cognitively fully biased that we don't realize this aspect, and this gets on the way of reaching a true happiness as well as helping others in more need to achieve that same (and ultimate) goal of life.

Free will is a very romantic and poetic idea in deed, yet it fails miserably in becoming a tangible reality, but our overconfidence, big fat egos and self-denial trick us to believe that we

actually have the absolute power of deciding on which road we will take our lives. We are all full of these biases, and therefore, the leaders of our World too, making weak policies based on inside strategies and taking equally weak decissions that have a great impact on our societies. But since we fail to realize -and many times to recognize it- we live in a kind of bubble believing we are some type of special individual to whom these bias-based decisions won't affect.

We then fail forward when it comes to help others in need, believing falsely that we have nothing to do with it, despite having that feeling of empathy when we look at pictures of children dying of hunger in Somalia or Haiti (to give some examples). The thing is, as it usually goes, nothing is black and white, but our poorly-based, bias-blinded cognitive processes force us to believe that only the rich should help, or we then find justifications such as "I can't save the World on my own" which paralyzes us to take on actions.

We don't take a moment to think that the environment in which they happened to grow, shaped in a major way the course of their lives. How guilty is a 5 year old girl that happened to be born in a misogynistic society such as Saudi Arabia? Or a 3 year old boy dying of hunger in Haiti? Or how guilty are you of being born in a rich European Country or at least in a country and a family of such economic level that let you develop so far as being able to buy a computer, pay the internet bill and drink a beer while reading my blog rants? The truth is, we were lucky, very lucky just as much as the little girls and boys from other extremely poor and unfavorable environments were unlucky.

I mean, think about it, how many times did you see those scenes from Haiti and thought, "poor people, hopefully they'll carry on, I wish I could help". Now, what did you do about it? I'm not trying to preach here because I didn't do anything either, I just scrached my balls and thought "oh man, that's fucked up!" Actually I used to make fun out of my wife for donating blood every six months that will help people she most likely never meet. That shit happens when we let our biases take over our lives.

How would our personal economy be affected by donating E50 out of our pockets to poor children based in underdeveloped, miserably destroyed-by-war-and-religion countries? Why the fuck should I care to whom my blood donation is going to help? But then again, we fail to think, why should I help them, it's not my fault that the earthquake stroke! Why should I give my blood up for somebody who might decide to speed up in his motorcycle despite the risks of an accident (which is by the way another symptom of a cognitive bias)? But the problem is not only about helping others, we also fail to help ourselves, over and over again we give priorities to immediate self rewarding actions even when knowing with certainty they will badly affect our futures, or the futures of the ones we love.

The book gives various examples such as retirement plans, not wearing a helmet when driving a motorcycle (in regions where is not enforced which is not the case in Finland), abusing our bodies by eating unhealthy. We prefer spending the money we have now rather than placing it for our future despite knowing we might have nothing when we retire which might bring much bitter consequences (also not the particular case in Finland where a retirement plan is not an option but an enforcement), we decide we feel more freedom by riding a motorcycle without a helmet despite the astonishing statistical evidence that indicates you have 40% more probability of dying if an accident strikes, or we eat to the extreme to ease our gluttony despite the scientific, indisputable evidence of the negative effects on our health.

We erroneously believe that these decisions only concern us and will have consequences also only on us. But this is our biased-base way of thinking, because if we fail to save for our

futures, other will have to pay their taxes so that the government can subsidy our errors, or to pay for the costs of hospitalization prior to our deaths as a result of negligence, either to wear a helmet or to live a healthy life. So is not only affecting us at the individual level but also others and as a society. But it all comes from a background, were circumstances have failed for one reason or another to present us with the evidence of why we act the we we do, as counterintuitive as this might be. I urge you to think for example, the next time someone approaches you begging for money, you don't have to give anything of course, but at least remember they might not have any other options than that, they might also do, but that we cannot know, so let's try not to judge people without knowing what lies behind their present.

So the book explains one by one the biases that drive us to this behavior. I won't obviously expand as the book does so I just rather mention them quickly, but I hope I did a good enough job to at least stimulate your curiosity and further research on the subject, as understanding these issues are a cataly

st toward a better life for each one of us as well as for the ones most in need.

So these are some of the cognitive biases --our systematic cognitive tendencies toward error-- mentioned in the book:

Base-rate bias - When we ignore available statistical data (as clear it might be) in favor of our own.

Internal approach bias - When we blindly believe our strategies will work by relying only on our power of will (inside strategies).

Overconfidence bias (conceit) - Needless to explain, overconfidence is almost never positive, actually it can be dangerous.

Framing bias - When we have an approach of an issue or situation that is too narrow.

Omission bias - When judging harmful actions as worse when omissions or inactions present an equally harmful effect (i.e, it is worse to bring about harm than to let harm occur).

Status Quo bias - The tendency to like things to stay relatively the same despite having better options at hand even when knowing it.

Availability bias - The tendency to judge jarring, unusual, and otherwise salient events as representative (like believing we are more likely to die in a terrorist attack than in a car accident).

Hindsight bias - The tendency to find past events more predictable than what they really are in order to avoid deception.

Anchoring - The tendency of setting a range of an entire decision-making process based on a random (and usually inaccurate) number.

There are more but I will stop here. Thanks again for reading!!

R.