#1
According to Shpancer, refusing to think about something we know is true is a form of avoidance. "It may provide short-term relief from discomfort, and can sometimes help us keep from becoming distracted, but in the long term, a habit of persistent avoidance—a refusal to face your known challenges—becomes a bigger problem than whatever issue you were avoiding in the first place," the author of The Good Psychologist told Bored Panda.
This, let's call it practice, sounds quite similar to denial, but, as Shpancer pointed out, the latter is a refusal to accept or acknowledge the truth altogether. "The benefit of denial is that it may, in the short term, buy you some time to summon and mobilize your coping resources," he explained.
"When we hear bad, surprising news, our first reaction is often 'No, it can't be,' even if we have every reason to trust the source of the bad news. This momentary denial may allow us to 'catch our breath' as it were, before delving into the hard work of coping. Relying on denial for the long term is, however, unhealthy. Such persistent refusal to acknowledge and face facts erodes interpersonal trust and communication and leads to bad decisions. If you're falling, there's no use telling yourself that you've learned how to fly."
#2
Sherman, the author of Neither Ghost nor Machine: The Emergence and Nature of Selves, agreed, highlighting how human life is uniquely anxious compared to other organisms. "Just compare the range of worries a human could have compared to any other critter. No contest. To cope, we need denial, escapism, entertainment, but to survive we need all hands on deck in reality too," he explained to Bored Panda.
"I'm on a campaign I call 'optimal: see illusion, safe escapism or strategic gullibility', encouraging people to take their denialist flights of fancy but always with a return ticket to reality safe in your heart pocket. It's not how far out you go, but whether you remember to come back. The big difference between a death metal concert and an authoritarian political rally is what happens in the parking lot after. After the metal concert, people return to reality. After the rally, people think they've experienced something more real than reality. That's dangerous."
#3
One study of 2,000 adults across the United States, which was commissioned by global tour operator G Adventures, suggests that the average American spends 12 hours and 56 minutes escaping their reality each week. (That's roughly four years over a lifetime.)
The most popular forms of disconnecting from work, responsibilities, and everything else that drives them crazy came in the form of reading books (1 hour 34 minutes), watching movies (2 hours 37 minutes), and dreaming of vacations (44 minutes).
However, as previously mentioned, this can't go on forever and we need to come to terms with the world around us. Jeremy Sherman thinks people can make it easier for themselves by focusing on what he calls ironic fallibilism.
"An ironic situation is one where you get the opposite of what you expected: you do the right thing and it comes out wrong or vice versa. An ironic attitude is recognition that despite your best effort, ironic situations are not entirely escapable. There is no sure-fire formula for living. Just when you discover the meaning of life, it changes."
"Ironism is not cynicism. It's the recognition that life is deeply tragic and deeply slapstick. Life is tragicomic," he explained.
#5
"Fallibilism is a concept in philosophy and more than any other notion, fallibilism has given me peace of mind about dealing with reality," Sherman continued. "I think of the fallibilist mantra as 'no matter how confident I am in a bet, I remain still more confident that it is a bet. Life is iffy guesswork. Yoda is wrong. There's only try. One can make better bets. One can bet with high confidence. One can't escape betting."
Sherman sees ironic fallibilism as the antidote to two unworkable approaches that are often combined:
The first one is fundamentalist hypocrisy, or pretending you have the formula for living though you don't, can't, and shouldn't live by it. And the second one is cynical hypocrisy, or pretending there's no formula so you can do whatever you want.
"[Jerks] (I'm a psychoproctologist) employ both. Everyone should live by their supposed fundamentalist formula that they cynically don't think they have to live by. No deed is too dirty for saints like them."
#6
Professor Noam Shpancer added that we should revise our expectation that life should be easy, and the attendant aversion to discomfort. "Hardship is not the end of the world," he said. "It is just the world. The default position for human beings is resilience. Normalizing the struggle is useful."
"Second, accepting reality tends to be easier when we take a long-term perspective, because the danger and damage associated with a failure to face reality are usually obscured in the short run and clarify only in the long run. When making decisions, it is, therefore, useful to consider not only your present self but the well-being of your future self as well. When you fail to deal with the facts of your circumstance, you in effect sell out your future self."
#7
Finally, we must constantly work on educating ourselves and seeking knowledge that can provide answers to questions we sometimes can't even articulate. Shpancer believes that history is the subject to start with, as it "shows what happens to those who deny the facts, and about the scientific method, which shows that in refereeing competing truth claims, following the evidence is our best bet.
"'Facts,' said John Adams, 'are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.' The evidence wins out in the end. Don’t you want to be on the winning side?"
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