Avoid the bad, and seek the good: in both good and bad ways
Let’s not ever forget how subtly difficult life really is. We all want to make good decisions. So why do we so often make bad ones?
In theory, we avoid the bad and seek the good. One form of this is we seek what’s easy, the path of least resistance. We stay friends because it’s easier than not being friends. But as people change, you might end up with a Ship of Theseus situation on your hands. They’re not who you befriended. Do you stay with the sinking ship? Why?
Now suppose this is someone you married. Shouldn’t you love them in sickness and in health? What exactly is the right course of action when divorce on paper still means you both have to share your kids? And character assassinations are common in divorce.
You can seek the good by staying away from harm. You can look at “wise” sayings like “you are the average of your 5 closest friends” as an indictment—a kind of label, a box you’re doomed to stay in. Or you can look at these boxes as “this is where I am now”. So if all your friends are awful, the answer isn’t to let go of them and become friendless.
One solution to having bad friends is to cut yourself off completely. Let’s sit on this idea for a second. If you have zero friends, then the indictment you may now get is that you’re so selfish and unfriendly that even the worst don’t want to associate with you. Cutting people off can feel so good. In fact, if the costs outweigh the rewards, it’s probably the rational thing to do. And to stick with them because of previous investment is the sunk cost fallacy. You don’t want to be irrational, do you?
On the other hand, it’s worth believing that there’s a world outside the one you feel stuck in. Maybe you’re trapped in a local maxima. To escape would be freedom, and it requires faith. Better the enemy you know, right? Why leave? And if you take this logic to it’s conclusion, you end up justifying North Koreans putting up with another year of terror. To believe in the “outside” may have no rational basis, but imagine if they all committed suicide because there was no reason to bring children into such an awful world. This would be tragic. Having kids is a very clear way to signal optimism in the future.
But even having kids isn’t enough. If the kids are born of lust, it’s not optimism that brought them into the world, but maybe some mix of pleasure, guilt, wanting to do the right thing, etc.
Faith always needs to enter the picture because it’s so difficult to plan out the future. To wake up every morning, you have to have some hope in the future. Otherwise, why get out of bed? To exercise for the mood benefits? What are we? guinea pigs? But we kind of are. This is depressing.
The best hope we have is that we might be rats in a cage, but that there is some hope of escape, whatever our situation might be. Why does a dog return to its owner? If life is good, why leave? We are hormetic creatures. We gain from disorder. Seeking to avoid pain is only good to a point.