Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday.  At least, I think it’s Thursday.  I’m wearing my Thursday trousers and my Thursday boots.  You may think I’m joking, but I’m not; I have a specific pair of each of those things for Thursdays.  The other days of the week are not quite as specific because all my other trousers and shoes are identical one to another, at least in “make and model”, if you will, though some have seen more wear than others.

I don’t like having to choose what to wear anymore, and I don’t want to have to worry about matching colors or styles or anything like that.  So it’s all black, same shirt brand and model, same trousers, underwear, socks, and shoes.

But on Thursdays, I wear a pair of‒get this‒gunmetal gray trousers*.  They are the same brand and “model” as the others, though.  Interestingly, the gray ones don’t hold a crease nearly as well as the black ones do; possibly something about the dyeing process affects the fabric.

Oy, this is boring, huh?  I can’t believe I’ve been writing about my clothes!  The thing I meant to address when starting this post was that I feel mildly unsure about days and dates lately.  I’m not completely lost, of course; I can check my phone and computers and whatnot to confirm the day and the date and the time.  Also, of course, I remember writing in yesterday’s post about how the date numbers were 1-2-3 in order, so it was December 3rd.  And yesterday I did the payroll, which means yesterday was Wednesday**.

There is, however, a circuit or module or subroutine in my brain/mind that seems weaker than it is in many other people:  the feeling of being right (as in “correct factually”, but to a lesser degree, also the feeling of being morally right).  This is not to be confused with the intellectual process of discerning whether something is correct, in either sense.  I’m talking about the feeling, the belief if you will, that one is right, which often has very little to do with actually being right.  One is an intellectual process while the other is an emotion, and emotions are unreliable indicators of truth or guides to action‒but they are powerful***.

This is an important and consequential dichotomy.  It gives rise to the tendency for a particular societal issue, so nicely put by Yeats:  “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity.”

I strongly suspect that it’s not being “the worst” that leads to such passionate intensity, but rather passionate intensity‒that feeling that one is right‒that makes one prone to do horrible things.  If you feel that you are right, you’re more inclined to give yourself license to do whatever you think is “for the greater good”.

I think this is also part of the explanation for OCD****.  Sufferers have some dysfunction in the parts of their brains that produces the feeling of being right, so they have to keep rechecking and can become more and more unsure of more things, developing “rituals” and repetitive behaviors to try to stave off the anxiety of not being able to feel that one has, for instance, turned off the stove, even when intellectually one knows, or at least has good reason to think, one has done so.

I have at least a little of this problem, perhaps best exemplified in my use of mental arithmetic.  I keep track of ongoing sales at an individual and group level in the office, by dollar amount and by what is sold and so on, and I put it up on “the board” to update it as it happens.  Over time, I’ve gotten pretty good at mental arithmetic‒I never was very bad at it‒and I’ve even gotten to the point where, for fun, I will do some algebra and calculus equations in my head, say if I see one as the thumbnail of a YouTube video.

But even though I’m generally confident of my results intellectually, I never feel okay enough not to check my numbers using the functions of, for instance, Excel.  So, I can run many numbers faster in my head than I could using a calculator, but I cannot trust my answers.

At some level, I think this is better than the alternative.  We can probably all think of people who are quite sure of themselves, quite confident in the results of whatever “thought” processes they have gone through, and yet are woefully off-track or unqualified or just fucking wrong.  And we see what such people do to the world, because they are quite comfortable asserting themselves and seizing power and resources, because they feel that they are in some sense correct.

When you feel that you’re right, you don’t tend to check yourself as often as you would otherwise.  You also are less open to criticism and suggestions, because they fly in the face of your feelings.  This phenomenon is nicely explored in the book On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not by Robert Burton, MD*****.

I could go on and on and on about this, I’m sure.  But it’s time to draw this to a close for the day.  I will finish with one of my favorite quotes from Radiohead:  “Just ‘cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.”

TTFN

*Why do I use the word “trousers” rather than “pants” when I’m an American?  Well, I watch a lot of British comedy panel shows, to the extent that I find if I say “pants” I feel that I’m talking about underwear, since that’s to what the British term “pants” refers.

**Last week, though, due to the holiday, I did the payroll a day early.  And, of course, I didn’t wear my Thursday pants (trousers) at all last week; I wasn’t going to work, so I just rewore the clothes from the day before.  It wasn’t as though I was planning to interact with anyone else, and indeed I did not.  Still, maybe the holiday has thrown me off a bit.

***For good, sound biological reasons as I always say, but such reasons can easily overshoot usefulness and become detrimental.

****It may also contribute to chronic tendencies toward depression, in which one never feels one is “right” either literally or morally or existentially, and also to the tendency for people with depression to be more prone to be accurate in their self-assessment of things such as, for instance, driving ability.

*****I just realized that “On Being Certain, by Robert Burton” rhymes.