GDMNT | Why? 🩷
“The belief that one’s own view of reality is the only reality is the most dangerous of all delusions.”
—Psychologist Paul Watzlawick
During the 1990s, a tee-shirt became popular among Americans from the southern and rural United States. It was a response to being called white trash.
- “God don’t make no trash,” the shirts read.
Trash, for our purposes, is a human construct made of air. It's interpreted individually – not universally – by the 8.1 billion people on earth.
Yet we continuously forget these simple facts about perception and reality.
My name is George (G.W.) Schulz. I’m an Emmy-winning former journalist who grew up in Tulsa where I live today.
I’m also in recovery from alcoholism and a lifetime of insecurities and anxieties.
And I'm utterly fascinated with the human mind.
The mission of GDMNT is to shed light on how we think from your email inbox. It seeks a better understanding for you and me of what behavioral science and psychology reveal about us.
By subscribing, you'll learn extraordinary facts about the human mind. I'm certain many of these facts you've never known before.
What can you expect from GDMNT?
- Bite-sized stories will be 300 words or less.
- Each email will contain one to two stories.
- Emails will arrive two to three times a week.
Sign up now for full access to the website, email newsletter, and archive.
"But George, why does this matter to me?"
Modern scientific understandings help us grasp the real reasons why we behave and make decisions the way we do.
We’ll be exploring important discoveries made by scientists about the human mind.
So what happened to the white-trash shirts?
Some people wore them with pride. Others sneered at those who did.
Who was the better person?
There are 8.2 billion possible answers to that question worldwide. The shirts point to an expression popular in the media world:
- Perception is everything.
Why are tortillas priced $3.99 instead of $4.00 if we're rational thinkers as economists historically believed?
We think and act irrationally far more often than we realize.
Cognitive errors and lapses that distort how we perceive the world are tightly wired into our dizzyingly sophisticated minds.
They enable politicians and corporations to nudge us and persuade us and distract us.
To understand how difficult it is to stop them, try these actions:
- Stop yourself from blocking a surprise punch
- Stop yourself from swerving to avoid a collision
We have far less conscious control over our decisions than we realize.
The ancient Greek philosopher Plato said the reality human beings "see" is shadows cast by objects on a wall, not the objects themselves.
We perceive the shadows as reality.
Plato said we can learn to see the objects themselves.
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