Why You Shouldn’t Take Life Too Seriously

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?Some of us aren’t taking life seriously enough. We waste our time, disrespect ourselves, and do nothing meaningful throughout the day. I was like this until I cognitively realized that we are only given one life and could die in any moment and lose this beautiful experience because I took it for granted and now I’m filled with regret.

However, some of us are taking life so seriously that we lose sight of why we’re even doing this in the first place, which opens the floor for other issues like with our mental health.

The following is an excerpt adapted for this article from my upcoming book: Screw Being Shy, releases March 14, 2020. To be notified of its release enter your email in on my website: markmetry.com

It’s easy to go through life and not question the very “pictures” and “videos” your brain shows you in front of your very eyes. By reading that sentence right there you might think I’m absolutely crazy or I’m onto something. Existence is no more than neurons firing in your brain, taking in information from various sensors like your ears and fingers to then vividly create a reality you see in front of your eyes, like a projector screen. When in reality the real information being displayed is not on a movie theater screen but the teleprompter / projector in the back playing mini-images with a combination of light and moving pictures.

You ever wonder why those pictures on Instagram of the different colored white & gold or blue & black sweater or those sneakers Will Smith put up look different to each person?

It’s easy to dismiss these as an “optical illusion” but the very word used in this phrase, illusion can be a bigger analogy of the illusion of life’s experience’s itself. That’s because we are all very much not living in the same reality and our brains and other various biological processes are the ones running the show. 

A study published in the Journal of Research in Personality found that your personality & mood can impact low level perceptual experiences correlated with the personality trait of being more open minded. Meaning, if you are more creative you literally see the world in a visually different way. Another study in Progress in Brain Search even found that practices like meditation (which we will cover in the chapters below) influence our neurobiology, where processes like our perception itself, action, attention, and learning are coherently orchestrated, according to the single general mandate of free-energy minimization. Which is a big phrase to mean that the energy you experience daily is how your brain processes information via your senses as well as your internal state, which can be heavily regulated with meditation.

Cognitive Biases & Distortions

Have you ever heard of cognitive biases & distortions? According to leading researchers our brain through thousands of years has created these mini-backdoors. Almost shortcuts to processing information, the same way a computer works. Instead of right clicking text on a document or website, hitting copy, then going to another document, right clicking and hitting paste. You can just hit CTRL + C, then CTRL + V. Our brain does the same thing but, life is not as simple as a computer. Our brain is a highly sophisticated growing meta computer that can be wrong in many ways. Science says there are anywhere between 65 to 175 cognitive distortions that make our reality “work” but research may change and could be fewer or more than what we expect today.

A study out of Brooklyn with a researcher by the name of Benson (2016), cognitive biases help us address four different problems and filter down the over 100 biases into shortcuts or reasons for their place.

Problem 1: Too much information to deal with (information overload) so our brain uses tricks to select the information we are most likely to use. 

Problem 2: Not enough meaning; but we need to make sense out of what we perceive. To solve this problem, we fill in the gaps. 

Problem 3: Need to act fast.  

Problem 4: What should we remember?

These meta problems that make up our life day to day and the malfunction of our brain can be a large contributor to an individual experiencing social anxiety. In fact the study goes on to lay out the potential issues with each one of these distortions.

Downside 1: We don’t see everything. Some of the information we filter out is actually useful and important. 

Downside 2: Our search for meaning can conjure illusions. We sometimes imagine details that were filled in by our assumptions, and construct meaning and stories that aren’t really there. 

Downside 3: Quick decisions can be seriously flawed. Some of the quick reactions and decisions we jump to are unfair, self-serving, and counter-productive. 

Downside 4: Our memory reinforces errors. Some of the stuff we remember for later just makes all of the above systems more biased, and more damaging to our thought processes.

Another researcher by the name of Duncan Pierce (n.d.) goes on to categorize the cognitive biases using the following groupings and the implications of daily life: 

Social and group effects: Social and group related biases are biases primarily involving relationships with other people. These biases may be helpful in understanding group interactions in organizations.  

Attitude to risk and probability: These biases affect how individual people makes decisions in the presence of uncertainty and risk or with probabilistic outcomes. They may have an influence on planning and decision-making activities.

Seeking/recognizing/remembering information: The information we internalize can be strongly affected by our existing ideas. What stands out strongly to one person may not be noticed by another. There are several cognitive biases about attention–how we direct our noticing and evaluating activities.

Evaluating information: How we evaluate the information we are aware of can also be strongly affected by our existing ideas and some seemingly built-in thinking “shortcuts” we apply.  

Taking action: Once the information is available and has been evaluated sufficiently to allow action to be taken, other cognitive biases may have an effect on the actions we take, perhaps delaying or prolonging them.

Memory, retrospection: Once action has been taken, the ways in which we evaluate the effectiveness of what we did may be biased, influencing our future decision-making. 

Judgement and liking: How we judge others and expect them to judge us (in terms of liking, moral acceptability etc.) may be influenced by a number of biases.

Real World Implications

Now, I’m not saying that life is just a puppet show that someone is running only on the inside of the mind. There are very real physical complications in the material world, but the way in which we act in the world, is based on a model that our brains created as an attempt to accurately model the world. However, life is very complicated, let alone each individual person (8 billion) trying to live their own life and how it intersects with other people’s mental model of the world. There are very real external problems in the world.

For example, myself I faced a tremendous amount of racism and bullying. My brain heard time and time and time again from others that I was a terrorist or I was a sand n***er or I would never amount to anything and just be poor my entire life. Or maybe it was the fact that I was poor in a town where most people were not poor and seeing myself wear the same clothes again while Jimmy got new fancy pair of Jordan shoes instilled a piece of information that I was worthless.

Why? Because my values and mental models were set primarily on external wealth and we all know money does not create happiness. But, in that model my brain assumed Jimmy had a great life, when in reality his mental model could be telling him that his life sucks, and his dad hates him and he buys these shoes to compensate for his sadness. Unless I had an authentic conversation with Jimmy I would have never known. Yet, my brain and the mental model created from my experience and values does not accurately reflect the world, but reflects my mental model of the world and in turn shaping my behavior and actions of how I act in the world. 

This lack of awareness and religious embodiment of trusting everything my brain shows me with a healthy dose of skepticism sets the ideal breeding grounds for having poor mental health and not actually living the life you want to live. Now, I know everything I just said could be misunderstood or not understood at all unless you’ve lived it. It’s hard to read a book with just the written word or if you’re listening to this via audiobook and try to level up the fidelity of your experience. In the sections below we will discuss how to manage and navigate our brain’s existential waters to best suit us and the situation at hand.

My Upcoming Book - Screw Being Shy 

In my book, Screw Being Shy I will guide you with the proper conceptual frameworks and practical application based on science of what you can do to create your own path out of social anxiety and not being a prisoner of your mind and not wait on other people in life to open the door for you. 

Releases March 14, 2020 to be notified enter your email in on my website: markmetry.com

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