Today we delve deeper into this series on Ego and finding ways to stop screwing up your life. The art of storytelling is something we forget how much all humans do brilliantly every day.
We come up with stories to explain our actions in real-time as naturally as we breathe or talk. We rarely notice it happening because it is essential to our existence. As we rarely notice our breathing without paying attention we don’t notice our constant stories.
Derek Sivers points out the slight problem with this - Your explanations are not true
Confabulating
Our explanations are easily believed so we give them far too much trust. This can lead to poor decision-making and unhelpful actions.
To confabulate is the art of creating explanations that you believe to be true.
Con - means to put together (or to trick)
Fabula - means story or fable
If you don’t know why you did something you need an explanation. Your subconscious creates a theory that you then accept as fact.
“You know, when you get old, you see that everything is a joke. All the things you were passionate about don't mean a thing. You only did them to keep busy.”
― Erica Jong
Humans in the lab
Split brain patients have a disconnect between their right and left brain hemispheres. They show an incredible ability to make up stories for things they believe are true.
A researcher asks them to start walking in only one ear. Then asks the other ear why they are walking. The patient replies she felt like getting a drink.
A researcher shows a question to one eye asking the patient to close a window. The patient closes it. They show a question to the other eye asking why they closed the window. The patient replies he was cold.
The examiners noted that the patients genuinely believed their invented explanations were completely true. They had no idea it was made up and showed no uncertainty.
Stop feeding the ego
Our ego needs us to behave sensibly and needs to justify our actions. It works so powerfully that we confabulate ideas to protect ourselves and blind ourselves from the truth.
We rationalize into the first logical reason we can believe is true and then accept it. The very act of rationalizing is not searching for truth, but searching for something we can believe is true.
A big danger is that we are more likely to blame external events and people for problems than to look inwards. It’s very easy to come up with a rational-sounding reason why something or someone caused our current woes.
Start with doubt
Acknowledging this, Derek Sivers advises we should do two things.
“Stop asking people for explanations, and ignore the ones given. Since our reasons are unknowable, focus on actions.
Doubt your own reasons, no matter how true they seem. Get curious about what your other hidden explanations may be.”
See these recent posts if you missed them:
Note
This email was heavily based on the Derek Sivers post Your explanations are not true.
“Good artists copy, great artists steal”...
This series on ego is much more complete with an explanation of how we sneakily we make up our own stories.