Twenty Bucks

As the current thematic drift has been sorta along the lines of "quit bullshitting yourself" and also "quit repeating yourself" I'm going to repeat one of my favorite themes: how good we are at bullshitting ourselves.

This may be an old example but it's so damn good I'm going with it again:
If I offered you a twenty dollar coupon that you could apply to a thirty dollar grocery bill with the only stipulation that you had to walk an extra fifteen minutes past your regular grocery store to a second store to earn the discount, what would you say?  No brainer, right?

Now let's change the offer: would you make the same fifteen minute walk to earn the same twenty dollar coupon if you were purchasing a fifty thousand dollar car?  No fucking way, right?  I'm spending fifty grand so twenty bucks is chicken feed, right?

This is illogical.  This makes no sense.  Zero sense.  The coupon is a reward for walking fifteen minutes out of your way but in one case you jump at the offer and in the next you laugh it off, even though it's the exact same thing.  This is why people pay money for a navigation system they'll never us or for a bigger engine that provides no extra performance.  They compare instead of looking at the math.

I don't trust my thinking.  And I think a lot.  The message to myself is that most of it's bullshit.

Our minds do this stuff all the time.  There's an evolutionary reason behind it, no doubt, but it's not helpful in all cases.  This is why those of us who have been around for a while know how important it is to talk to other people.  We're nuts, basically.  We're not really nuts anymore and we're not nuts all the time but we're still nuts.  I cannot tell you how many times I've been in the middle of a story or an anecdote or a justification when I see a skeptical look grow on the face of the person I'm talking to.  Just because I've manipulated the facts so that they make sense to me doesn't mean that they make sense in an absolute sense.