This will be a very short post, and it's mostly my thinking around a puzzle-me-this notion.
I've recently encountered a number of situations where people acted highly irrationally. In some cases, their behaviour was very clearly against their own self-interest. The behaviour, if continued, would negatively impact their lives in a significant way. And the thing is, most of the time they know this is the case and can't take the steps to remedy their situation.
To what extent does an individual's surroundings influence their judgment? How long is enough for a person to wallow in their misery? How can an external party impact the person who's struggling? What is getting in the way of the individual taking steps to make a change?
I've been pondering about and reading into human behaviour / social psychology a lot. While reading through the findings for a number of studies, I was reminded of one quote in particular:
“Whatever people say, they lie.
Whatever they do, that’s the truth.”
I can't find a reliable source for this quote, but it's probably by some economist. Speaking of economists, I am reminded of one particular passage from the opening of Daniel Pink's book, DRiVE (The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us), which goes:
When I took my first economics course back in the early 1980s, our professor – a brilliant lecturer with a Patton-like stage presence – offered an important clarification before she'd chalked her first indifference curve on the blackboard. Economics, she explained, wasn't the study of money. It was the study of behavior. In the course of a day, each of us was constantly figuring the cost and benefits of our actions and then deciding how to act. Economists studied what people did, rather than what we said, because we did what was best for us. We were rational calculators of our economic self-interest.
The inner workings of human beings is really so fascinating!
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Photo: a snapshot of my fridge during the bachelor life. I waxed poetic about being healthy, but just look at the contents of the fridge!