Tag: delusion
-
Never Assume You Know Their Reason
One of the most valuable lessons I learned in my life was to stop assuming that I understood a person’s motivations for doing something. I used to think that the obvious (and usually malicious) motivation that I first came up with to explain another person’s behavior was probably theirs. That is, if someone was driving in…
-
The Difference Between Optimism and Delusion
Optimism has a bit of a rap against it. Too many people, my former self included, cast aside optimism as a sane perspective on life because they’re making a simple and obvious mistake: conflating optimistic delusion with optimism itself. I raise this not to make the pedantic linguistic point — I assure you I refer to no dictionaries. Nor…
-
The Gap between the World We Want and the World We Have
Almost no one arises in the morning with a desire to wreak havoc in the world. (Psychopaths, not my enemies, are the reason I say “almost”.) And yet the world is very regularly judged “a mess”, even in places that no psychopath has been. Most people believe in “the Golden Rule”. Many would testify to…