So I should tell you that I think human rationality is a very silly construct, albeit one people have tried to impose on other people for thousands of years.
Assuming there’s a single version of logic that works for everyone is downright crazy, and the ‘rationality’ prized by certain types of people is just a very special form of rationalization. I mean sure, there’s a certain amount we all have to agree on for the sake of the social contract, but we really need to stop lying to ourselves that a single set of circumstances (particularly our own) will make other people happy.
Take my decision to move to Austin. I told people this was my plan all along, but I wasn’t actually sure I’d make the move for several months. Saying ‘Austin’ got people off my back, though, because it sounded rational. I didn’t have to lift a finger, everyone made rationalizations for me: ‘Of course!’, they’d say. ‘Austin is a great city for jobs! And there’s such a low cost of living!’ or whatever else they’d read in Forbes.
All true. But all completely irrelevant to my decision-making process. Here’s what really decided it: my wanting to burst into tears every time I was getting on a departing flight at the Austin airport. Which happened every I time I’ve left, for five years.
Is that rational? Not particularly, at least if you use the standard definition. A rational person would, I suppose, care about unemployment rates and demographics and such. I absolutely didn’t. And I’ll be honest with you, if I’d have visited Jackson Hole and had the gut feeling that I just needed to move there, I would have done it in a heartbeat.
(You’ll doubt this claim, but trust me, I am exactly that stubborn and unwilling to listen to anyone else. It’s a gift. So while we’re at it, no, I haven’t read Dan Ariely. I might someday, I hear his stuff is good and I bet we’d agree on a lot of things but — here’s the important part — I don’t need an MIT scientist to validate my own observations, nor am I concerned if my ‘studies’ overlap/agree/disagree with other people’s. Ah, the beauty of not being in a field…)
I’ve seen people (women, mostly) try to talk themselves into being attracted to someone they find unattractive. I’ve heard people tell me they’re happy when they’re clearly miserable. I know scads of people who tell me they’re incapable of even knowing what they want. Why? Because they’re trying to be ‘rational’ by the general standards of society.
This is bound to fail. Yet, as I know from experience, if you don’t lie to yourself and others about such things you’ll quickly be labeled as an irrational person.
(And, I can’t help but add, this is also true when you bring up quality of life issues in academia — how dare you think you have the right not to live in Farmopolis, North Dakota if that’s what the noblesse oblige of your art demands?!)
Anyway, the whole reason I was thinking about this was because I got this in the mail:
Molly Ivins, for those of you who don’t know, was an awesome political writer/curmudgeon who wrote in her native Texan accent, and getting a random mailer about a play about her reminded me that Austin was the right place for me — which, again, isn’t terribly rational. The play premiered and ran elsewhere (funny thing, I Googled it and found that Paul Krugman enjoyed it — see, there are some economists I think I’d get along with.) But Austin is celebrating it in style, with a beloved local actress, and sending random mailers to invite people to the party.
And then there’s the breakfast taco issue. And the fact that a there’s a guy here who does nothing but ride his bike around town, totally nude except for a tiny flesh-colored thong. He’s called ‘Thong Guy’. My collaborator and I saw him whiz by yesterday and took it as a good omen. And it’s not just that Austin wants to keep things weird, it wants to keep things weird in a fiercely independent, kinda libertarian but still somehow hippie-dippie fashion. It’s quite a feat.
Most importantly, Austin is a great place for people who have stopped giving a rat’s ass what other people think. So I won’t tell you to move here, because I don’t presume to know what would make you happy. But if you ever decide to admit it, whatever it is (snuggies, local moose herds, working at Kinko’s — go crazy with it!) you might consider visiting.
Update: Ha, cognitive linguist George Lakoff agrees with me, in much prettier words.
I have a friend who lives in Lubbock. She’s homegrown and we always have fun with the ways of her world. The town names alone are entertaining. I’ve never been able to tour Texas, only stopped in a couple airports. I would like the part where they ignore the government though.
Yup, it cuts both ways: when you don’t care what other people think, you tend to ignore the government too…
I’m from Montreal (the English part) and I decided to go to a French, more rural university for my undergraduate and then master’s degrees. There were lots of “good” reasons for choosing the school: good co-op program, small classes, super cheap tuition and room and board (seriously, less than $1000 a semester for tuition and $160/month for my room in res that had a kitchen, so I didn’t have to buy a meal plan – the rooms even had a sink and mini-fridge!), etc. But really, when it came down to it, I was getting the hell out of my house, but I didn’t want to go too far away. And I just knew, from having visited it, that it was the right school (I wasn’t wrong).
My husband, who is the most rational person in the universe (seriously, the joke is that he’s a robot), will never admit to this, but I’m pretty sure he took one look at me and knew that he was going to marry me. The only problem was, most of his friends thought I was irrational for going along with it (“Really? Him? What do you see in him?” Really? You’re his friends?).
Last year, when I was unemployed and miserable in this small rural town in the South (but not deep south), I started doing yoga to, I don’t know, do something. It was a really zen sort of instructor and at the end of the hour, I was supposed to open myself up to the universe and ask “Is there anything I need to know.” I know, snort. But I asked, almost in jest, and “heard”: You’re where you’re supposed to be. I burst into tears, and from that moment, things did start getting better. Still not sure that this is where we belong long-term, but it’s clearly where we belong right now.
I love this post (man, I am just going on and on) because it does reflect such a antithesis of what we are supposed to represent as academics: rational, logical, unemotional, etc. I was just reading about a professor whose husband told her not to write about fantasizing about committing career suicide because it appeared too irrational, and thus lead to just that: career suicide. Sometimes we have to go with our gut. It might be irrational, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
I agree, on the worst days, the illusion of rationality is really all academia can provide…but yet we cling to the illusion so tightly. I’m tired of people who act like people are computers. They’re not, and pretending they are just doesn’t help anyone. Glad you found the right place to be, though — it is a nice feeling.
I agree with this post, most definitely: I personally think logic is highly overrated and firmly believe that the most profound decisions/ideas/reactions to whatever Life throws at you are NOT logical…that’s what makes them so important and worth paying attention to.
I really enjoy Austin for the reasons you mentioned above, its random hodge-podge nature (part bohemian-intellectual, and part state-capital-business-y) is incredibly endearing.
However, I had a similar “eureka” moment when I first started spending time in Fort Worth: I got to know some people here, got to know the city, learned everything the town had to offer and realized that I couldn’t really imagine being anywhere else. It was a very fulfilling, very Zen-like epiphany when I realized I was in the right place at the right time, doing whatever it was (is?) that I’m supposed to be doing.
Zen-like epiphanies are very helpful things…if only people wouldn’t hassle you about them. Never been to Fort Worth (only Dallas, which did not call to the depths of my soul) but I’ll have to give it a shot!
Heh. I don’t even bother any more trying to explain why I live in Iowa (or, more accurately, why I LIKE living in Iowa). (“Farmopolis” to you, kiddo!) The concept is apparently too, um, irrational to be believed.
Hey, I’m from the Midwest too, I got no beef with rural! But it’s just not for me…
I just have to lead with ‘Hey ADuffie26, Ft Worth rocks!”
Ben Franklin tells a great story about keeping a strict vegetarian diet, but after a boat capsized (I think) some people fried up some cod to eat. Franklin walked through a flimsy argument and ate the cod, which he noted smelled so good, thinking to himself ‘how wonderful a thing it is to be a rational animal’.
I agree with all, and it seems the further along I go, the more heavily seemingly irrelevant factors weigh in my decisions. Recently, there was a slight possibility of moving back to the US, and my wife (after several reflective days and knowing were an offer made it would likely be the only job in classics proper I would ever be offered) practically burst into tears and said: ‘I don’t want to live anywhere there’s a walmart’. That isn’t snobbery, by the way, it is more like synecdoche for strip malls, consumerism, cheap plastic crap, and so on. For my part, well, it was the thought of taking a driving test to get a new license that really made my heart sink. So I get this post. Cheers.
I don’t blame anyone for not wanting to live near a Walmart, for a plethora of reasons. And I think one of the reasons I was putting of my move was because I knew how ridiculous the license process was… and yeah, that Ben Franklin was as stand-up guy!
Robert: You’re absolutely right, I’m glad you think so too!
WoPro: Dallas doesn’t call to the depths of anybody’s soul, because it’s an urban area where nobody really lives because they’ve all moved out to the cookie-cutter yuppie suburbs. In Fort Worth, we actually have literate people and entertainment and culture and stuff! (Which Dallas has too, we’re just less pretentious about it.)
I’ll have to give it a shot, once the snow has cleared! Only three hours away…I’ll let you know when I’m in town
You seem to have a narrow idea of rationality. Making a decisiom to maximize happiness or minimize sadness is perfectly rational in utilitarian traditions.
Au contraire, my little nom de plume, I have been accused of being a utilitarian more times than you can possibly imagine — usually in the same tone of voice you’d use to shout ‘pig’ at a cop. Myself I prefer to avoid the label as it seems to be associated with philosophical types who nitpick at others to feel smart.
@luther blissett
I agree. I think the word “rational” has been distorted to mean “not against the norm of society,” not necessarily by the author of this blog, but by most people in the world today. Every time in my life that I’ve listened to other people and followed a “rational” path – i.e. the path that makes most sense in terms of getting what is currently valued by society – then I’ve essentially screwed myself. Was that because being rational is overrated? No, it was because I was in fact being illogical about the decision. I was ignoring the most important piece of evidence: my lack of desire to do what people were telling me I should do. If I had paid attention to that, I would have made a completely rational but more satisfactory decision. And when I DO pay attention to the premise that “X is undesirable to me and will not make me happy” then it’s much easier to come up with the logical conclusion of “Therefore I should NOT do X.”
Having said that, and though I have a slight disagreement over the term “rational,” I am in full support of the spirit of the post. We have to make our own paths and not make mindless decisions to just go along with what the actuaries/academics/[insert demonized authorities here] say we should be doing with our lives. Lord knows how many times I’ve gotten “the look” from people – you know, the one that people give when you’ve apparently spouted an auxiliary head out of your left shoulder? When in reality, all I had done was explain the plans I had to do whatever it was they disapproved of, because it “didn’t make sense” or “had no practical application.”
You might want to check out the Lakoff article link above. One of his main points (and mine) is that you can’t assume a single definition of anything, as everyone’s got their own associations with it, and trying to explain academic ‘precision’ to the world at large just doesn’t work.
I did read the article and a few others (and one of my “irrational” decisions was to get a BA in Linguistics, so I was already familiar with Lakoff’s work). To be perfectly honest, I’m skeptical but not entirely certain that I can express exactly why just yet. Still chewing things over.
Actually, if the argument is that there is not just one meaning for “rational,” wouldn’t my saying that I disagree with your definition (or at least the definition under discussion in your post) only strengthen your point?
Employing Lakoff’s logic, it’s entirely possible that you’re skeptical because it does not accord with your own world view, while I believe because it accords with mine. Hence the problem, I suppose.
Arguments welcome, though I find comments pretty limiting and don’t think they’re a place to have in-depth debates — obviously, that’s something better suited for a bar-type environment
And yes, our argument certainly supports Lakoff’s argument. I guess I’ve never shared academia’s profound love for arguing about definitions; so often, it’s just an excuse for not making any sort of pragmatic decision. For anything to get done there’s got to be some sort of general agreement…even if it’s just an agreement that everybody’s working with their own definition! And for me (a translator) the only realistic starting point is that everything has a spectrum of meaning. That’s just how words work, imperfect tools that they are.
I was just trundling over here to post a clarification to my last reply, actually, so let me do that first. I have formal training in linguistics, yes, but I am not at the same level of training and experience as the top professionals in the field, so if it seemed that being skeptical meant that I was dismissing Lakoff’s work, it wasn’t intended that way. But I do, however, know that there are major schisms in the world of professional linguists and my tendency has always been to explore both sides and see what I found to be consistent with my own thoughts on a subject. Lakoff’s views on language and thought fall in some grey areas that I haven’t quite sorted out yet. I know he claims that he is not, in fact, supporting a sort of cognitive relativism, but it still seems that way to me, at least until I am able to delve further and understand both sides a little better. Until then, it’s just cognitive dissonance!
Anyway, regarding your last reply, I also didn’t intend to debate or argue and I apologize for indulging in a little thinking out loud on your comments page. You’re right – it’s a discussion best conducted over martinis.
As I originally said, even though I more likely disagree than agree with your views on rational (or irrational) thought, I really enjoyed the post. In fact, I just stumbled across your blog about a week ago and liked it enough to bookmark it immediately.
And Austin may not be the right place for me, but it’s totally cool.
No problem and thanks for reading. And I agree, Lakoff is still kind of having to depend on claims of scientific objectivity (that’s why it’s valid research, right?) even though his own conclusions aren’t really in line with that — I mean, seriously, why is he targeting journalists and not academics? And again, you’re welcome to think out loud, or argue and/or debate. I just think there’s a limited scope the latter can have unless you’re talking in person, so it’s frustrating when people (especially academics) really want to get into it. Frankly, it’s the most inefficient way to have an argument, and a waste of everyone’s time.
Long time lurker, first time poster.
Love, love, love this post. It’s very hard to talk about anything we want to do that is even SLIGHTLY out of the ordinary, like say, convince an employer to let you work part-time so you can learn to write literary fiction (which no one buys, and you can’t make a living from anyway), because no matter what ,you can’t help people understand WHY. (Especially if you’re currently a Business Analyst for a fortune 100 company. Ack!) If you’re very lucky, you have friends or people who love you who understand it just makes you unspeakably happy, and that’s good enough. Thanks for a great post.
You’re welcome, and come back to comment any time. While I have some issues with people saying ‘what do you care what other people think?’ (answer: because it strongly affects many aspects of your life, no matter how self-confident you are) I do think there’s a point at which you just have to go with it!
I found your website after googling “Academia Sucks”. I love it so far. It’s good to see other people making their lives happy in the way they want. I’m from Texas, went to grad school at Vanderbilt, and left a whole “career” (if you want to call it that) of research and hard work after 3 years in the middle of the Ph.D. program. The perfectionism, the crazy hours, the narcissism and insecurities, all for producing an article that 20 people might read in the world, and that, in 20 years, no one will read. So I just up and moved to NYC on a whim with no job and have been happy ever since! You have to move out of your world to see how crazy that world was, and congratulations for having the bravery to do so. (P.S. I went back to grad school in something entirely different and only for future monetary benefits. It’s fun to laugh at some of the same craziness because now I’m not attached to it.)
You know, I’ve a had few hits from that search term, but at least it indicates an uncrushed spirit. Worse are the searches for ‘I hate being a professor’ or ‘how do I get out of academia’! You’re right, though, it’s really hard to see how crazy the situation is until you’ve already left, and the peer pressure is enormous, which is why it’s so hard to leave! But once you’ve grasped it, I admit it’s kind of amusing to watch other people take it seriously! Congrats on find a good place to be…funny how where you start isn’t necessarily the best place to end up.
Here’s what really decided it: my wanting to burst into tears every time I was getting on a departing flight at the Austin airport.
This is exactly how I feel about New Orleans. It’s a bittersweet feeling.
Yes, it’s a problem when you don’t get to choose 100%…but who knows what the future holds?
I congratulate you for taking the opportunity to move. Most people from Nashville (I know, I know, you’re not originally from there…) talk about it all the time and never do make it happen. Hats off to you. I left 13 months ago, and don’t have even the slightest twinge of regret.
And Austin rocks; all of my family is in TX and some are in your area. If you ever see the thong guy, you’ll have to take a pic and blog it. I’m genuinely curious at this point…
Thanks, I’m thrilled to be back here. Moving gets harder as you get older, I know, but there’s also the fact that you know more about what you want. I’ll be sure to post a pic if we get one!