At the request of a friend, and regular reader of these posts, I grapple once again with the slippery concept of Deleterious Cognition — a thought process that leads to harm rather than better health, optimism or anything good.
My friend himself provided an excellent example of the process recently and has graciously offered it for use here. He had a wonderful long weekend in Roma, his wife was charming and delightful, the light and food were fantastic, everything was beautiful. Then, on returning home, crippling pain a few days later. The cause and effect, in his beleaguered state, seemed clear to him. He’d enjoyed himself, therefore there was a karmic price to be collected ASAP, and it had come in the form of this crippling pain.
His theory may be true, it may be bullshit, in any case, there was nothing good in it for him believing it — except to be on guard against enjoyment. The main thing was that it made his suffering worse. I wrote:
I don’t know about your karmic payback for enjoying yourself in Rome theory. There’s cause and effect and then there’s just bitter coincidence. A belief in the karmic payback theory might qualify as Deleterious Cognition. A theory that makes the reality even worse than it might otherwise be, absent the theory. As good a definition of that elusive concept as I’ve ever arrived at.
And there we go. You can see this kind of thinking everywhere, such as when we fear the worst and are later relieved to find out we were wrong, though we can never get back the time spent fearing the worst. We can construct elaborate thought castles, every room a different kind of torture chamber, but walking through these castles is a game for suckers.
I had great success with the workshop last week. It was almost unbelievable how close to my conception of how the workshop would operate it was. The children ran things wonderfully, several discreet jobs done well and the room a beehive of focused creative activity from 3:15 to 4:55. I was almost giddy as I sent off a touchy feely email to the parents of the workshop members, along with the edited animation. As often happens, I heard nothing back from any of them.
Then, a day or two later, speaking in a voice as clear as these bold-faced words you are reading now, Deleterious Cognition said: “you went too far, they now believe you are nuts, maybe you are nuts. Why did you ruin everything?”
The plain facts are these: I did not go too far, nobody thinks I am nuts (though maybe I am) and I have ruined nothing. Far from it, I have created something out of the air, something with great potential to help everyone who comes in contact with it.
But I would not know that listening to the voice that, while seemingly quite logical, and bedecked with a fancy name, is only a kick in the balls dressed up as a well-meaning thought process.
