Learning to live with irrationality

No matter how great their teachers, few students genuinely yearn for the life of the mind. Most people don't use the Internet for intellectual enrichment. Perhaps this is why I find myself increasingly frustrated by the inconsistency and irrationality I encounter in everyday life. But how should I deal with that frustration? How can I become less angry at people for being, well, human?

With someone who doesn't enjoy thinking, increasingly sophisticated arguments often accomplish nothing. At that point you're not having an intellectual conversation, you're trying to make someone interested in having an intellectual conversation. That's usually a losing proposition.

To preserve sanity, one must deliberately construct an intellectual ecosystem: books, a few intellectually curious friends, serious conversations, challenging projects. Let the rest of the world be the rest of the world... Not out of superiority, but out of boundary setting.

Once you repeatedly observe irrationality, it's very easy for "People frequently behave irrationally" to become "People are idiots." The first is a useful empirical observation. The second gradually poisons your relationship with humanity. Try "What mechanism produced this belief?" Now the phenomenon becomes interesting. Was it:

• conformity?
• status seeking?
• fear?
• tribal loyalty?
• lack of information?
• cognitive overload?
• incentives?
• childhood conditioning?
• simple laziness?
• an experience you don't know about?

You move from judging the output to understanding the system that generated it.

Education cannot manufacture intellectual curiosity very reliably. You can give someone an excellent teacher, books, a university, the Internet and enormous amounts of information, and they may still prefer entertainment. That's frustrating if you regard intellectual development as one of the great things humans can do. But perhaps the healthier conclusion isn't "Why don't people appreciate this?" It's "I'm lucky that I do." That turns the same observation from an indictment of humanity into gratitude for your own curiosity.

See also: Thinking Fast and Slow