Good Life
Choose reason and empathy as the foundations of a good life, benefitting all life.
according to Comprehensive Sensemakers, our ability to reason can be an endless source of curiosity, creativity and beauty, but not all our reasoning leads to our creating a better world.
Antagonistic ways of thinking feel natural to us because our minds, in part, have evolved to prefer them, but they lead to fear and stress, and they bring disaster as often as they bring prosperity.
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Evolution has left us with a remarkably large number of cognitive biases. These biases served us well in more primitive and dangerous times, but in many ways, they work against us now. They make us prone to racism, tribalism, magical thinking, conspiracy thinking, demonizing others for mistakes, deferring to authority and more.
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Our minds also have the ability to reason.
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Most of human existence was marked by short lives, hunger, disease and hardship. The Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment and the subsequent Industrial Revolution turned all that around. These revolutions are based on the values of reason and sympathy, and humanity has been on an upward climb toward greater and greater success ever since.
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In The Evolving Life, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi referred to this conflict between the older and newer parts of our brain as “Memes vs. Genes” and to some degree there is a burden that comes with our genes. Of course, with everything genes have their good parts too.
Therefore:
Choose reason and sympathy as the foundations of your life; use your hard-won experience and knowledge to make a better world for yourself and your fellow humans, and you will find that it can be a good way to spend a life: it leads to fulfillment, peace, and a sense of purpose, and it will help ensure human civilization continues well into the future.
Try to avoid jumping to conclusions by developing a habit of looking for Many Explanations to the phenomena you experience; maintain a Guarded Mind so that others can’t take advantage of your biases; and keep your mind open—Uncertain Knowing—so you see errors in your thinking