Which Cognitive Vice Is This?

I have a password that was generated for me by a password program. It's reasonably secure; it's a pseudorandom set of mixed case letters and numbers. It's one of many like that; I generate a new one for each context. It contains, in the middle, by chance, a sequence of four letters that are the same as the name of a minor character in a lesser-known story by my favorite author, but with the vowels taken out. And only if you don't count y as a vowel.

It's an accident. And not a very interesting one, at that. And yet every time I type it, I think of it as an homage to great literature, and hope the writing gods see it as such.

My Cognitive Vices: Penicillin Thinking

Sometimes I justify my mistakes by telling myself that they might result in serendipitous discoveries. Like when Fleming accidentally contaminated a culture plate with mold, and discovered penicillin. I call that penicillin thinking.

Running

Why am I running? Why am I running away from what I have to do?

I rationalize. I suggest, well, maybe it's for the best, because what you're supposed to do isn't really what you're supposed to do. But that doesn't sit well. First of all, it's obvious rationalization, and rationalization is an epistemic vice. Second, if it were true, I'd expect it to look more like doing something else, and less like just not doing this. I don't exactly have a bias toward action. And I feel like I should. I suppose it's possible that the right thing to do right now is nothing, but my upbringing tells me otherwise. My upbringing says, no, you only get to use that excuse if you're doing something more important, not if you're doing nothing at all. And then the rationalizer says, well, I'm always doing something; suppose breathing or daydreaming is the more important thing? And we go around again.

I also have learned helplessness. And what an apt learner I am. Even when I protest, it's always phrased as "Why can't I?" Never do I suggest that maybe I just could. There is implicitly some savage dark power shackling me. It must be dark, indeed. However I peer into the shadows, I do not see it.

Certainly we can't have evolved lazy. I admit, it makes sense to conserve resources. It makes sense to minimize risk. But there has to be evolutionary pressure to do what we must.

What if that's it? What if we have evolved to do what we must? And here, in the Age of Fructose, there is so little must to go around, action escapes us. We're content to sit in a great crowd, picking nits from one another's fur, and we don't get up to forage for fruit, because fruit is all around us. At our fingertips. Clinging to us. Weighing down our bellies and buttocks. Instead of hiding in the trees where it belongs, beckoning to us to climb.

Epiphanies

If epiphanies took as much time and effort as learning and experience, we'd hear about them far less frequently than we do.