Negativity and the Tricks of Perception

Filed under Articles on 18. January 2007 »

Most people will be familiar with the ebb and flow of interest and motivation, and how frustrating it can be to swing from one thing to the other without ever really committing to anything. This can apply to casual interests and hobbies, consumer goods, career options, places, situations, and even friendships.

For example, you might watch a movie in which the lead character is a newspaper photographer and get a sudden and intense interest in photography. It’s never really been anything you paid particular attention to, but suddenly you find yourself starting to read magazines on photography, invest in expensive equipment, immerse yourself in it completely, and then finally get a job as staff photographer at a local newspaper. At first it’s exciting, as you’ve still got the bug you caught after watching the movie, but after a while the novelty starts to wear off. You’re interested, but somehow it seems to be more and more difficult to maintain the initial enthusiasm — on good days you get a whiff of it, but as the months wear on you gradually lose interest and start seeking something else. That seeking is usually subconscious, and at some point you will find the next thing to be enthusiastic about. Maybe you go on an assignment to photograph horse breeders or something, thinking “now this looks like something I would want to do for a living.” And the cycle repeats itself.

This is an extreme example of course, and most of the time these fluctuations in interest won’t be able to carry you long enough to actually achieve anything substantial. The enthusiasm tends to dwindle and shift to something else before you start taking steps toward the new dream scenario, because as soon as you go beyond the glossy surface the novelty will have worn off already.

Romanticizing this, degrading that

As people go about their lives from day to day, there is a running commentary going on in their heads to keep track of what they judge to be desirable and undesirable. We constantly remind ourselves of what we don’t want — “I sure hope this doesn’t happen to me,” “this shouldn’t be happening,” “I certainly want to avoid this” — in the belief that if we forget, everything we don’t want to happen will. This is characterized by the tendency to think in terms of extreme polarities of likes and dislikes, where we paint one thing as heaven and the other as hell.

This judgment of good and bad plays an enormous part in how we perceive the world around us. And anyone who has ever been in love will have seen how this works; one day everything seems drab and uninteresting, but then you fall in love with someone and suddenly the whole world is exciting and beautiful. You start noticing things that before you had overlooked completely, and nothing seems to have the power to get you down. However, if this sudden state of bliss was entirely derived from an external source, which in this case is a romantic relationship, the effect will sooner or later start to fade, making the world seem that much less interesting again.

Manipulating emotions and exploiting the vulnerability of human perception is, as you know, big business. It is the foundation of many of the world’s most profitable industries — imagine the cosmetics industry stripped of branding and advertising — and, really, what drives our culture and the economy for the most part. Branding, advertising, and generally all the steps of marketing a car, for example, function to imbue a particular configuration of metal and plastics with glamorous mental images and a story. It is a process of romanticization, where in this example a personal transportation device is presented as a lifestyle; it is made to represent a mental image of a desirable life situation, and plays on the part in our minds that looks at life purely in terms of mental images.

In our everyday perception, the influence of marketing and its fabricated romanticism probably affects our perception more than we realize, but even without the direct help of advertising we usually manage to fulfill the role ourselves. As we walk around and perceive people, situations, and objects, it is as if we have an inner marketer constantly trying to steer us toward certain things and away from others. More often than not the emphasis is on what we want to avoid, and so instead of casting things in a positive light as in advertising, we do the opposite and attach a negative story to the objects to degrade them. This would be sort of like an internalized negative ad campaign, constantly making negative associations with the intent of manipulating ourselves.

Sounds insane, and it is.

Just as an advertisement attaches positive labels to a bottle of soda, essentially transforming flavor enhanced water into a representation of freedom from suffering, we play the same game in our own minds all day long. If you work in an office, your internal marketer may be trying to sell you the desirability of working outdoors; the fresh air and exercise, not having to wear a suit and tie all day; or if you work outdoors, you may be running a romantic ad campaign in your head about the wonderful life of being an office worker, wearing a suit and spending your day in a comfortable chair, etc. Whatever it is, the grass is always greener on the other side.

Why we do it, and how to go beyond it

The root of all this, as always, is in the ego. The confusion of ego identification brings with it a mechanism of an almost continuous search for identity in external things and situations, which then acts as a handicap on our perception. So everything we see is distorted, and when the ego patterns are at their most active then nothing is seen clearly. It is said that we see only what we’re looking for, and when we’re seeking something as important to us as our own identity our perception tends to become extremely selective.

In order to go beyond the limits of perception, to gain a higher perspective on it so that you can avoid falling into the traps we’ve been talking about, all you need is to see for yourself just how unreliable our perception really is. This may be difficult at first, but one thing you can try is to pick something like an object, a career option, or anything that has to do with your life situation, and approach it as a marketer would. For example if you had to sell someone on the idea of wanting to become a medical doctor, you would probably get better results by showing him or her an episode of ER, or Scrubs, than by going into a hospital to visit a doctor at the end of an 18 hour shift.

As an exercise, sit down with a pen and paper and write two descriptions of something you’ve chosen (a car, a job, a person, etc.). One of them is a sales pitch in which you do your absolute best to promote the thing in a positive way. If you’re writing about a car, then this is the sales brochure. For the second description, do the opposite. An anti-romantic view where the thing is cast in a negative light, intended to dissuade anyone from wanting it. And, depending on what you’ve chosen as your subject, this is likely to be closer to your predominant everyday way of seeing it.

Maybe it works better if you do the positive one first, or vice versa, but one thing I think will help with both is to not go overboard in either direction. Making sure that the positive description sounds plausible to you, and that the negative one isn’t necessarily horror-movie negative — we’re going for a more ‘groggy Monday morning’ sort of negative, the variety you are probably more familiar with.

An even simpler thing to do would be to just look at some of the romantic images that are being associated with often mundane and uninteresting things, in advertising for example. Simply paying attention to the overload of semantic exaggeration in a car brochure can trigger a sudden realization about this, and when you’ve done the description exercises a few times in writing it will be easier to manipulate your own perceptions when you go about your daily life. Ask yourself for example, “what would this situation look like in a perfume commercial?,” and see how it takes on a wondrous and magical image. Half-joking, perhaps, but this can actually bring about major realizations on the nature of how we look at the world around us.

When you see just how unreliable your perception can be, you will become free of the fluctuations between desire and avoidance that so characterize life for the majority of the population. You will be able to see things with a newfound sobriety, a clear vision, and with your attention freed from the exhausting task of seeking an identity in everything, the beauty and simplicity of the world around you will at last be seen in their fullness.