Liberate Your Mind by Rejecting the Arbitrary
Rejecting ideas that are not based on evidence can clarify your thinking and free yourself from all manner of needless anxiety.
Do you ever worry that you might go to hell after you die? Do you ever fear sleeping after watching a supernatural horror movie? Do you worry that your plane will crash when you take a flight?
I suffered from all of these worries when I was younger. I didn’t really believe that hell existed, but I still thought, “What if it does?” I didn’t believe in ghosts, but I still lay awake imagining one coming through my bedroom TV to kill me after I watched The Ring. And, despite the fact that I know a lot more about aircraft than most plane passengers, I still used to have nightmares about plane crashes in the weeks before a flight and anticipated disaster whenever I heard an unexpected groan or bump during a flight.
Worrying is a natural, human thing to do. It is an essential part of our survival mechanism. If we aren’t motivated to focus on real threats to our lives, we might not take the necessary action to avoid or minimize them. In the wild, worrying that there may be a tiger behind the next boulder might have saved your ancestor’s life. Even in the modern world, appropriate worries have their place. I can proudly say I’ve never been responsible for a car accident in sixteen years of driving, which I attribute partly to the fact that I don’t trust other drivers and frequently worry that other cars might pull out in front of me without warning or not go the way they’re signaling. That’s enabled me to anticipate and avoid dangerous moments other drivers might not have seen coming.
Most people appreciate, however, that excessive worrying is bad for your mental health and thus your life. An anxious life is an unhappy one, and too much worrying can make you so risk-averse that you don’t take opportunities, enjoy experiences, or attempt daring endeavors. What many people don’t appreciate, however, is that there’s an important difference between worrying about things that have some likelihood of happening and worrying about things that you have no reason to believe will ever happen—in other words, about arbitrary fears.
The arbitrary is a term for any idea or assertion that has no evidence supporting it. For example, if you lose your wallet and can’t find it in your home, it would be reasonable to think you might have dropped it on the way back from the store yesterday. You know that you drop things from time to time, you know you had the wallet at the store, and you can be reasonably sure you lost the wallet somewhere other than the house, so you have good grounds for entertaining the theory that you dropped it during that walk. On the other hand, it would be arbitrary to think that a friend you last saw two weeks ago, and whom you have no reason to distrust, gained entry into your home and stole the wallet. You have no evidence whatsoever to support that theory over any other potential explanation.
The only thing to do with an arbitrary assertion, whether it’s your own idea or someone else’s, is to dismiss it out of hand. Ideas that have no basis in reality cannot help us deal with reality and need not be entertained. The more we think about and derive other ideas from such assertions, the more we hamper our ability to understand and think about reality as it actually is. Unfortunately, our society is replete with arbitrary ideas that people treat seriously and it can be difficult to separate the large body of thought that’s based to some extent on these ideas from those that are based on reality. Many of these arbitrary ideas even directly contradict the nature of reality as we perceive it with our senses and understand it through reason. Some examples include:
The idea that the position of the stars at the time of someone’s birth influences that person’s character or future,
The idea that our ancestors survive in another world and are able to “look down” on us,
The idea that animals can think like humans and/or understand abstract concepts,
The idea that wishing or praying can cause something to happen in the outside world,
The idea that human beings are connected to the Earth and/or each other by invisible energy lines, and so on.
Perhaps you already reject some or all of these ideas, but are you confident that you always reject arbitrary assertions, including more mundane, everyday ones such as the arbitrary fear of a particular disaster, the arbitrary idea that you owe your time or money to other people, or the arbitrary belief that you will fail at a given task or test? Do you reject the arbitrary ideas that come from your own mind as well as from other people and the culture? And when you do reject an arbitrary idea, do you do so wholly, or merely on an intellectual level while still emotionally and subconsciously feeling as though the idea might still be true? When you change your conscious ideas about something, it can take a while for your emotions and subconscious ideas to catch up, but they will, provided you continually strengthen the new perspective with consistent thinking.
Developing the skill of rejecting the arbitrary can be enormously liberating. For me, it freed me of the fear of entities I have no evidence for, such as ghosts, demons, and even God. It also freed me of the fear of events I have no reason to expect, such as plane crashes and terrorist attacks. As I mentioned earlier, it can be reasonable to anticipate such things and take appropriate steps to avoid them when you have good reason to suspect them (such as an active terrorist threat against a particular location or an airline having a track record of bad maintenance). But when there is no evidence for them, worrying about them only serves to pull our minds away from reality, distract us from the real things that we should be concerned about, and cloud our enjoyment of life with needless worry.
By rejecting any idea that is not based on evidence, you increase the efficacy of your thinking and free yourself from all manner of needless anxiety—thereby keeping your thinking connected to reality and setting yourself up for a happy and successful life.
I plan to expand on the subject of this article in a “deeper dive” supplement—exclusively for paid subscribers—exploring how arbitrary hopes and goals can hinder our ability to flourish in life.