Impact bias

After brunch out, I brought some friends over to see all the crazy repairs and renovations to my house. I also tried on a fabulous dress that they gave me--"no more dresses" only counts for dresses I'd buy--but that's a post for another day. As I showed them around, I thought about how much better everything looked--the bathrooms I'd painstakingly painted, the floors I'd painstakingly paid for--in the context of how none of that pain mattered now. All I could think as I was going through it was, "will this ever end? Will the house ever look and feel normal? Is this all a waste of time and money?" and all I think now is, "wait, I used to hate this bathroom? I used to think, every day, this color is depressing me?"

I've been there with jobs (or, rather, applications of all kinds--applications to grad school, applications for jobs, applications for promotion): all you think at the time is, "this sucks, and it may be all for naught," but all you think if or when the prize materializes is, "wow, that was worth every minute of pain."

So why, why can't I apply my understanding of that reality toward dating? Because I'm really f*ing done dating. I just hate it.

In this context, I took in Maria Popova's latest post:

In another section, Stanford psychology Ph.D. candidate Michael Schwalbe turns to the intricate dance of risk-taking and the fear of failure. Citing the work of psychologists Daniel Gilbert, whose exploration of the art-science of happiness remains indispensable, and Timothy Wilson, whose work has revolutionized the way we think about psychological change, Schwalbe reminds us of the “impact bias” — our tendency to greatly overestimate the intensity and extent of our emotional reactions, which causes us to expect failures to be more painful than they actually are and thus to fear them more than we should. Schwalbe explains:

Gilbert and Wilson highlight two phenomena to explain this bias. The first is immune neglect. Just as we have a physical immune system to fight threats to our body, we have a psychological immune system to fight threats to our mental health. We identify silver linings, rationalize our actions, and find meaning in our setbacks. We don’t realize how effective this immune system is, however, because it operates largely beneath our conscious awareness. When we think about taking a risk, we rarely consider how good we will be at reframing a disappointing outcome. In short, we underestimate our resilience.

The second reason is focalism. When we contemplate failure from afar, according to Gilbert and Wilson, we tend to overemphasize the focal event (i.e., failure) and overlook all the other episodic details of daily life that help us move on and feel better. The threat of failure is so vivid that it consumes our attention. This happens in part because the areas of the brain we use to perceive the present are the same ones we employ to imagine the future. When we feel afraid of failing at a new business or anxious about the shame of letting investors down and what our peers will think, it’s hard to also imagine the pleasure we will get from our next venture and the other everyday activities that are a necessary and enjoyable part of life.

And yet Schwalbe reminds us that social science has invariably recorded that what people regret the most as they look back on their lives isn’t what they attempted and failed at, but what they never tried in the first place:

Of the many regrets people describe, regrets of inaction outnumber those of action by nearly two to one. … We are left with a paradox of inaction. On one hand we instinctively tend to stick with the default, or go with the herd. Researchers call it the status quo bias. We feel safe in our comfort zones, where we can avoid the sting of regret. And yet, at the same time, we regret most those actions and risks we did not take.

The solution, as a wise woman poignantly put it, seems to be: “Work as hard as you can, imagine immensities, don’t compromise, and don’t waste time. Start now. Not 20 years from now, not two weeks from now. Now.”

Fair enough. But I still will not apply that to dating.