Jargogled Impressions.

It’s hard to maintain a habit of anything. But making a habit of being happy is super important. and I have a feeling that being passive about enabling the right set of circumstances for us to be happy can impact us in all sorts of ways – some understood, others hidden beneath the layers of discontentment.

I have a feeling that people with OCD are hiding something deep beneath their recesses of consciousness. I am not trying to downplay that this is a recognized disease and that people may be suffering from it, or even that in some cases what we call OCD today is in fact common sense for the future (cleanliness -> COVID). But my feeling today on this is that, these people are finding some meaning and significance in the repetitive motions of their OCD, in the predictability of the operations, in the familiarity of the actions. And the causes could be many.

But is that wrong? If they find happiness in the things they do, and it makes them deal with the absurdity of the world around them, then is that all so bad? Evolution after all isn’t 100% rational either. It follows more the philosophy of what works, as opposed to listening to reason or cold hard rationality. Then why is it wrong for these people suffering from OCD to rely on their methods and their patterns of operation? it really isn’t. It’s just one of the many delusions we create for ourselves in this world that makes us more amenable to what the world serves us, and makes us address the hardships we face in life in a more attuned way.

It’s not just OCD either. The ‘useful delusions’ can manifest itself in our choices of how religious we are, how tethered to traditions and customs we are, and how much we loathe or appreciate the people we have around us. I just finished this book “Useful Delusions” by Shankar Vedantam, and you can see where these thoughts are coming from.

The author uses the story of Donald Lowry, an Illinois man who impersonated many women to deceive ‘gullible’ men into believing they were corresponding with a real woman, netting several millions of dollars asking for support and help while providing emotional comfort and a sympathetic ear to the single, lonely men across the U.S. Some of these men were aware they were being deceived, for they could sense in the correspondences they received from this fictional establishment Lowry set up. But they were content with this delusion as it satisfied their core need to feel connected and to have someone to talk to. Stories of fraud and deception are one too many in this world, but what struck me was the way in which the frauded supported the fraudster during trial, and how what looked like a simple case of deception turned out to be something more.

There are many situations in our normal day to day lives that we leverage delusions we have built for ourselves as mental models to lead our lives. When we are sick, have kids, respond to news bytes that anger us, or coming together as a community – all these instances are built upon the foundation of telling ourselves multiple stories of what it means to be human, what life essentially is, what our kids mean to us, or what human society is. In our current fascination for science and for the comfort of cold, hard logic, the author seems to suggest we need to look at what the evidence is telling us in understanding and learning from these delusions too. While we may not believe in the veracity of these delusions, their effectiveness can be ascertained and proven through quantitative and qualitative experiments – much of what this book covers through the various examples.

This book got me thinking about what delusions I harbor in my daily life that I a) am not aware of, b) am aware but don’t register it as such, or c) am aware and register them as delusions but am not intent of doing anything about them.

a) Not aware of: hard to isolate cases where I suffer from delusion but am not aware of it, but I think it’d be the biases I demonstrate when dealing with people (inherent, systemic biases as an Asian, young, Indian, straight, male, immigrant person). I know I tell myself stories of why X or Y happened, what my failures were driven by, how I am leading my life, etc.

b) Am aware but do not register: watching movies and crying because I can relate to the fictional character in the movie. Reading a book, creating the world that the author wants to create in my head, and then relating to the person in the book that is completely fictional but touches some core human emotions that I can relate to.

c) Am aware, and register them as such, but not doing anything about it: the feeling that I am at the center of the universe and that the world should pay heed to my thoughts, my writing, and my book reviews..