Walking on Custard & the Meaning of Life: A Guide for Anxious Humans by Neil Hughes & Tom Humberstone

Author:Neil Hughes & Tom Humberstone
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780993166808
Publisher: Enthusiastic Whim
Published: 2015-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

Assessing Beliefs

Realising that a belief is irrational, incorrect, or even just unhelpful, is costly to our minds. It takes effort, both in self-examination to find the belief, and perhaps in the social cost of changing our behaviour. But it’s always worth updating them to be correct, or at least healthier for us.

I have some personal experience with the effort of assessing beliefs and assumptions. For a while, I was a full-time travelling evangelist for the Catholic Church.[39]

Sadly, after a couple of years I had to stop, as I no longer believed in God. Which is a problem for an evangelist. (At least, for an evangelist who wishes to attempt to live with integrity.)

So I moved on, and became a computer programmer.

Incidentally, Catholic evangelist to computer programmer wasn’t as jarring a transition as you might expect. Though it did take me a while to get out of the habit of genuflecting and making the Sign of the Windows Logo when I arrived to sit at my desk in the mornings.

Before I go on, I want to be very (very) clear that “beliefs” are not exclusively spiritual or religious. Usually we reserve the word “belief” for a consciously chosen position, like spiritual or political beliefs. But these are only a small subset of all possible beliefs, which include anything that is part of our understanding of the world, e.g. “golf should hurt”, “I am bad at conversation” or “my clothes hang in this cupboard, not that one.”

I realise it’s potentially confusing for me to use this spiritual example, but it’s a good illustration of a time when I had to update a number of my beliefs at once.

As far as spiritual or religious beliefs go, I am not interested at all in converting you towards or away from any particular set of beliefs. I’m a little wary of mentioning my religious past, as it has the potential to alienate everybody; some people might dislike my prior religious association, some might be saddened at my traitorous move away from the fold. Hopefully, most won’t care.

Anyway, for the curious amongst you I will be dropping in a few fun stories from my travelling evangelist days later. But, as this book isn’t about religion, please believe whatever makes you happiest.[40]

Updating a complex set of interlocking beliefs about ourselves or the universe can take months. But since there is a base cost to assessing and updating beliefs, even updating a small belief like “the phone lives there” requires the not-insubstantial effort of noticing the belief and considering alternatives.

But it’s exhausting to constantly question everything. We don’t want to overcompensate and become overly sceptical. This mentality undermines our foundations by demanding proof for every little thing. And then proof for the proof… and then for that proof… and finally you’ve got no basis to believe in reality itself. And what if that is a trick, and we’re all fish just dreaming we’re human? Clearly, this is not a fruitful approach.

We can’t question everything, so we need to direct our energy into finding beliefs which cause us pain.

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