I like to think of myself as an intelligent individual. I like to think I am a reasonable person, that I look at situations and reason them through in order to make decisions. I stopped to take an objective look at my life the other day, though, and I realized something that I found both appalling and surprisingly unsurprising: I make decisions based almost entirely on magical thinking.
Magical thinking, according to Wikipedia, “… is causal reasoning that looks for correlation between acts or utterances and certain events.” Psychology Today says that magical thinking is a development of irrational beliefs based on our brain’s over-tuned ability to infer connections so we can feel as though we have control over our world. I am, apparently, a highly irrational person with control issues.
I have turned down jobs when I didn’t feel particularly lead to them. I once broke up with someone because, after several friends’ relationships ended, I turned on the television and the first thing out of the speaker was “break up with him.” The Palinode up there with the heart stickers stuck all over his face? Less than two weeks into dating, I secretly decided we were getting married, because events leading up to us getting together seemed to fate it to be so. My entire future was up to the fates!
I used to hang out with a lot of hippies, and magical thinking was lauded. They spoke of faeries and pyramids and went on spirit revealing midnight mushroom binges under the full moon, and I secretly mocked their reliance on magic to lead them. It turns out now, all these years later, that I am pretty much a carbon copy of those manic pixie dream girl and boy types I knew back then, only minus the chimerical entities and the psilocybin.
Part of me wants to panic that most of my 38 years on this earth have been lead by little more than faith in the feelings of my gastrointestinal tract, which is really not a solid rock on which to build my church, if you know what I mean, but another part of me wants to believe that I am particularly adept in my ability to ferret out meaning and capital-T Truth within the complicated universal web. I’m also starting to think that we’ve all got a bit of the manic pixie dream girl inside us somewhere.
Ego? I think I have a strong case of it.
How do you make life decisions? Do you write up careful lists and employ your critical thinking skills, or do you listen to your gut, patchwork together signs and wonders, and dive right in?
About Schmutzie
Hey, Schmutzie! Given that you and Palinode seem to be a pretty darn good thing together, I’d say – keep going with the magic! Also, remember that you and I were mistakenly assumed to be married to each other, on the night we first met? There was a pretty sweet vibe there, but fate had already stuck your heart(s) to the Palinode :) As for how I make life decisions, I often try to do the make lists and think about it rationally thing (which my brain feels good about), but usually things end up happening the way they do (as far as I can tell) from a combination of my efforts/energies and other factors over which I have no control…and yes, sometimes I like to think there might be some magic in it, and sometimes I have no faith in fate at all. Thanks for posing the question (and posting your own magnificent thoughts to get us going)! Hugs to you and Palinode!
So nice to see your smiling face here :)
Twitter Name: schmutzie
I think I use a combination of pro & con lists (if it’s something serious like a medical decision) and mostly just chatting it out with numerous people. I like to take in everyone’s 2 cents and kind of reason it out with my own. It takes me a long time to make decisions about some things – like what color to paint my kitchen but sometimes it’s a very quick decision about which new car to buy. I think that part depends on the hormone cycle ;).
Twitter Name: HeatherSchiavo
The examples of magical thinking you present could also be regarded as you trusting your instincts or listening to your subconscious. That’s my story, anyway. I won’t deny there’s a little of manic pixie dream girl about me too. Just don’t tell anyone. I’m trying to exude an air of rationality.
Twitter Name: tinsenpup
I’m pretty sure I do that also.
But I’ve tried the other way and it seems equally random–Pro v. con? what pros will occur to you and what cons will occur to you can be extremely arbitrary.
The weighting of the pros and cons is also arbitrary.
The choices you are describing definitely lend themselves to gut feel type decision making–love? Jobs? There’s no way to totally reason that out since it will come down to desire and your magical thinking as you call it really gets at desire as well as any other method.
In other words you are complete rational.
There are some things that this doesn’t work so well with because those things require research–like medical treatments or something of that sort. But those kinds of decisions are rare.
I try to be a planner, because if I can’t see some semblance of a clear path in front of me, I get sort of panicky. However, sometimes you just can’t deny the pull of the magical elves… Oh wait. It’s pixies for you.