Doomed to Fail

I am a fan of podcasts. Hidden Brain and Freakonomics are some of my favorite ones.  

After listening to Hidden Brain podcast on Choices which the subject was about choice, the interviewee Sheena Iyengar mentioned something about Asians that really struck me about how I navigate in the world especially now in my work life.   

IYENGAR: Well, I think in American culture, we have a very deep assumption, which goes like this - if a choice affects me, I should be the one to make it. By God, I'm the one who should make that choice if it's going to affect me. How could you possibly think otherwise? And in the Asian culture, they have an equally valid assumption, which says if a choice affects me and is important, then, by God, somebody really important to me is going to tell me or assist me or guide me on how to make that choice. How could you do it any other way? And that's an example of how a choice should be made, what constitutes a good or bad choice-making method. These are cultural constructs.

I still look for outside validation, for someone to tell me tell me/guide me/assist me as I fumble my way through my current job.  This is not the model of American work life.  This is not what they hired me for.  Hence my struggle of fitting in.  This has been a life long issue for me.  This helps explains some of it.

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Negative experiences were discussed in a Freakonomics podcast.  I think that from my upbringing and background, I have an imprint of negativity in my psyche.  Epigenetics shows that it is possible even from previous generations.  My guess is that as a product of both my parents that I had my Mother's Internment Camp trauma and my Father's pain of losing two of his brothers who were in their early 20s when my Father was still in high school.  Being a racial minority in a white, middle class suburb of New Jersey certainly did not contribute to having less positive experiences than negative.

The negativity bias, the universal tendency of bad events and emotions to affect us more strongly than comparable good ones.  In general, it takes about four good things to overcome one bad thing  (4-to-1). The negativity effect evolved because it helped keep our ancestors alive. As we say,“Life has to win every day. Death only has to win once.” I think most of us have lived a life of little positive things that offset the bad. I fight to focus only on the bad and would rather focus on the good.  I do know that I feel deep inside that the bad has outweighed the good.  

The takeaway from these podcasts is that my life has been unconsciously influenced in so many ways.  Knowing that there are evolutionary, cultural, ancestral, societal factors affecting how I am, who I am and what I am makes it both comforting and frustrating at the same time.  I am not the master of my life.  Do I really believe that I am doomed to fail?  On my bad days, yes.  I still cling to the notion that I can control my destiny or at least make conscious decisions that make my life better or at least happier.  This is still a struggle for it is that darn 4-to-1 "rule."  I seek to have those four good experiences and more or at least to find ways to escape the bad ones. 
 
I discovered two quotes that I had on my Facebook profile which I thought was apropos to this post:

"If you don't find God in the next person you meet, it is a waste of time looking for him further." -Mohandas K. Gandhi

 "I'm not a loser. I'm in my sacred moment." - Julie Piatt aka SriMati