It’s hard to be human because … – Ted Cadsby
It’s hard to be human because …
We are paradoxical creatures who long to be happy while creating our own suffering.
We worry about things we have no control over.
We whine about not being understood while casting a critical eye on others.
We self-righteously and stubbornly defend our entrenched opinions despite ambiguous, even contradictory evidence.
We aspire to goals we lack the discipline to achieve.
We struggle to adapt to a complex world that we ourselves created.
Our thinking and feeling are often poorly matched to the reality of human life today.
We oversimplify complex challenges.
We’re overconfident in our oversimplified judgments.
We overreact to small, unimportant stuff.
We are torn by competing desires within ourselves.
We search for meaning in the wrong places.
We haven’t yet mastered our neuron-packed brains whose design features can morph into design flaws.
The cognitive design features of our brains have always served our survival. But they evolved in a world that is different than today’s.
So the features become flaws in a need of a fix.
But there are fixes that make it easier …
fixes that offer complexity of thinking to match the complexity in our lives.
Cognitive scientists and philosophers have come up with powerful strategies to fix each of our cognitive design flaws.
These fixes all depend on reducing our reliance on the default ways of thinking and reacting that make being human hard. How?
The underlying mechanism that enables all of the strategic fixes goes by many names (e.g., metacognition, mindfulness); I call it “The Space Between.”
The Space Between represents the ultimate huma paradox: only by escaping ourselves can we make it easier to be human.
Go to the Hard To Be Human book details page.