Why We Fall Into Mental Traps

Several years ago, before ride-sharing apps became popular, a taxi driver in a city I was visiting told me that he wanted to be a real estate agent. He’d love to show houses to people, he said. He seemed to be a sociable person with something of a tour-guide attitude (he pointed out to me landmarks we passed by on the way), and I could see how he could be successful as a real estate agent.

“Why don’t you go for it?” I asked.

I do not recall what exactly he said in response, but it was something to the effect that he had never considered actually doing it.

While we were chatting, I looked up the real estate licensing requirements in his state. As I recall, they involved completing a course, filing an application, and paying a small fee. I shared my findings with my interlocutor and asked why exactly he thought a career in real estate was out of reach. Was there a particular requirement he could not fulfill? Or an aspect of the job that presented an obstacle?

The answers were “no” and “no.” It just seemed impossible for some reason, but he couldn’t say why.

I tried to suggest that he give it a try. What, after all, was the worst that could happen if he did? If for some reason it did not work out, he could always go back to taxi driving. He seemed at least somewhat persuaded by our conversation, though I don’t know what happened later.

I have thought about this case repeatedly over the years. The situation is not unusual. Most of us have a tendency to submit to the oppressive aspects of life by simply taking them for granted, by imagining that they are fixed and immutable. When we do this, we are like people who have a large room but dwell in a small corner of it, pacing up and down in exasperation, feeling confined and deprived of oxygen, simply because there is a paper fence around us that looks much sturdier than it is.

It is this propensity to imprison ourselves into traps of our own making that I wish to talk about here. What explains it?

The Tyranny of the Familiar

One common reason, I think, is the normalization of the undesirable through repetition. Consider an ordinary case. I once asked the baristas in a coffee shop I frequent whether they had any fruit. “No, sorry,” they said, “We get bananas every day, but they go really fast.” The person at the counter went on to add that if I wanted a banana, I should get there before 10 a.m., 11 a.m. at the latest.

One might think that if the establishment ran out of bananas before 11 a.m. every day (they remained open fairly late), they would order more so the supply would last through the day, but they did not. Why didn’t they?

I cannot be certain, but it seems to me that it is crucial how they reacted the first time they ran out of bananas early. At that point, it was probably easy to think of ordering more for the following day. For one reason or another, they did not do this, and when the issue recurred the next day, it bothered them less. It was just what had happened earlier and hence, it seemed normal.

Our mistake in such cases is to take the confirmation of our expectations as evidence that some feature of reality is unchangeable or close to it. While the heuristic is not a bad one in general, sometimes, our expectations are confirmed not because things could not have gone differently but simply because today, just like the day before and the day before that, we did nothing to effect a better outcome.

It is worth noting here that an attempt to try new strategies on a particular occasion has advantages beyond the issue we are dealing with just then: It makes it easier to tear down imaginary fences in other cases. One might say we habituate ourselves to not accepting as immutable the things we’d rather see changed.

Fear and What We "Deserve"

When I was talking to the taxi driver, I got the impression that part of the reason he was not taking steps to make his life into the kind of life he wanted was that he somehow felt he wasn’t one of the people meant to have an enjoyable life.

Pensive woman standing by a window.

Source: mythicson/Pixabay

Occasionally, we fear that bad things could happen if we pursue our dreams, as though the pursuit of happiness shows a lack of humility. What is more, when you try to improve anything, there is often a risk you’d end up making it worse. Hence, we fear change—because what if change is not for the better?

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This, too, is related to the question of humility and what we "deserve." Maybe, we think that if we seriously try to improve anything, the universe will teach us a lesson; that we’d end up failing miserably, like a tragic hero in an ancient drama, and come to regret not having reconciled ourselves to our circumstances.

But first, if things change for the worse, that unfortunate departure from the status quo need not be permanent. We can get it right on the next try. Second, while there is a place for humility in life, arguably, humility is best shown when we confront serious challenges. To simply assume we would be defeated before the fight has even begun is not humility but resignation.

In fact, one can argue that in resignation, there is a lack of appreciation for the potential that comes with being human. William James says, relatedly, “Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make very small use of their possible consciousness, and of their soul’s resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger.” There is no humility in such self-imposed constriction of our faculties and the psychic atrophy that results from it.

Panic and External Influence

Upon occasion, we do not see a way out of our mental prisons not because we have gotten cozy inside and worked out acceptable terms with our own dissatisfaction, but because we panic. It is not the eyes of habit but of anxiety and terror that conceal the exit.

This is a trickier case as panic is difficult to control. And yet, we are not completely helpless even here. More importantly, it may help to remind ourselves then that there are probably more and better options than it seems to us while in a state of panic.

Finally, we may not see the alternative possibilities, because someone else leads us to believe that there aren’t any. I once heard a former gang member say in an interview that the others had persuaded him he needed them, that no one else would accept him, and that he could never live the normal life of a law-abiding citizen.

We find the same pattern in many abusive relationships. Yet the people who have our best interests at heart are unlikely to try to keep us isolated from the rest of the world so any attempt to sever our ties to others should raise suspicion.

There is one more point I wish to make in closing. While we can become ensnared in the familiar through habituation, we can also accustom ourselves to recognizing mental traps. That too can become a habit, and so, easier with practice.

I am not suggesting that we engage in this type of examination so often that nothing in life is ever settled for us and all is in flux. A lack of stable preferences can be no less detrimental to well-being than mental traps. Nonetheless, a habit of examining the origin of our belief that this or that undesirable feature of life is immutable and fixed is, I think, a habit of freedom.