Recently, I saw this video by Veritasium about a concept called Learned Helplessness. The concept is very fascinating and it sheds light on why people and the world does the a lot of the things they do.
Learned Helplessness is a phenomenon where if an animal/person goes through a painfull situation where they have no way to get out of that situation, they then "give up" and don't try to get out of similar situations in the future, even though in those cases there may be a solution this time. Such a person is said to have "acquired" learned helplessness.
You might say that Learned Helplessness is just "common sense". If you fail to solve a puzzle, it demotivates you and thus you are less likely to even try similar puzzles in the future, even though they may be easier than the current one. But when you start looking at looking at the more important parts in life, you realise that this phenomenon has a huge effect on how successful one becomes in life. It also explains why certain groups of people act the way they do.
For example, people who come from poor families are generally more conservative with their money. It's because they have felt the pain that comes from not having enough money. While being a conservative spender is generally a good thing when it comes to consumption, it often leads to missed opportunities when looking for investments, because these people aren't willing to put up with the risk that an investment with a higher ROI often has. Over the decades, this can lead to a huge difference in income and net worth.
Schools are often the biggest source of Learned Helplessness!
Schools are one of the biggest source of Learned Helplessness. A school is a very restricted environment and you have no way to make the restrictions go away. It's like a prison where you don't have any hope of leaving. Many people come out of school with a worldview that is very pessimistic. They think that their life is hopeless and boring quite often when there clearly are solutions to the problem. The reason this happens is that for 10-15 of their crucial years of development, they are in an environment that forces them to suffer in silence.
School for me was a very bad time. It was a place of endless restrictions, a place that bred pessimism at industrial scale. The only reason i'm not a cynical person is because my family taught me to be optimistic.
When you consider the fact that every child is educated, you realise that all of society suffers from Learned Helplessness. It's a very scary thought.
How do you 'unlearn' Learned Helplessness?
The world will always try to shove irrational pessimism down your throat. You have to be vigilant of this. You have to be aware that your mind is constantly seeing information that skews it towards despair, helplessness, and pessimism.
You have to be aware that the world is biased towards pessimism.
Once you see this bias, you have to counteract it, or at the least, you have to take it into account when making an assessment of the situation. Quite often, you'll find that there are solutions to problems that seem unsolvable or "ever present". Quite often, you'll find that it helps to be optimistic by default. Ultimately, both optimism and pessimism are bad when they are based in irrationality. But you can't make the world shut up, so you have to counteract the forces it exerts on you so you can see the truth.
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