Ask Karen 👱🏼♀️
"It's great to be great, but it's greater to be human."
—Will Rogers
> 35,000 decisions | vigilant
There is no universally and objectively shared definition of "trash" as it applies to people.
Yet we call each other trash with conviction.
Who decides? A committee of judgy homeowners and Karens recruited from Nextdoor? 🏠
No.
Then why?
Because "trash" is individually interpreted by the world's 8.2 billion people.
- But we interpret our individual truthinesses about trash as objective truths.
To many Americans, it feels like the truth when we call our fellow Americans in the rural and southern United States trash.
It only feels like the truth, however. "Trash" is just a human construct and an adjective.
Constructs rule the world around but exist only in our minds.
Our subjective perceptions and conclusions and assumptions and mental associations are formed from blasts of hot air, not careful conscious thought or objective reasoning.
We’re oblivious to the sometimes devastating effects of such hot air caused by cognitive errors, biases, fallacies, and illusions.
We’re oblivious to the automatic nature of our sweeping conclusions and assumptions about other people and places.
These cognitive processes don’t compel us to seek goodness in the world. We seek to see goodness in the world despite them.
- Parents, detectives, lawyers, doctors, teachers, lawmakers, neuroscientists, and PhD psychologists are not immune to mis-thought. No one is immune.
I worked for years as a journalist. Over time, I came to think I knew what media audiences wanted.
But graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin rattled and humbled me.
Scientists had discovered that audiences didn’t know why they chose one news story over another.
I quickly learned there was much more that people didn’t know about their own minds.
- next time Chapter end
- listening KRS-One "Step into a World (Rapture's Delight)"
– 30 –
>> full series | alerts | playlist / social | tip jar