The Value of Doing Things
How action is the antidote to cognitive dissonance and more
One of the benefits of doing things is it forces you to reconcile values you have. Stated preferences are transformed into revealed preferences. Cognitive dissonance shrinks in the face of action.
When you sit around thinking, or scrolling social media, or talking casually with friends, it’s incredibly easy to move from one topic to another that are in tension with each other — without ever detecting the tension. This is not a problem, per se. You should be able to have moments where you are not concerned with the logical compatibility of every proposition, explicit or implied. But, equally, you should have a mechanism for detecting these value tensions and incompatibilities.
Doing so, and thus becoming clearer on your values, offers at least three benefits:
1. You become an individual
Saying something like “Authenticity is good” and then moments later “Receptivity is good” is really just to make two statements that amount to no information. All you’ve communicated is that you value valuable things. It is vacuous.
I understand these statements have social utility, but I contend the utility is limited and may blind you to the substantial upside of not being a complete shell-person.
What transforms an NPC into an individual is that they are willing to say something like “While I value both authenticity and receptiveness, on net, I think it is better to prioritise authenticity.” It is this act of finding a tension between two, or more, values that individuates you.
If you’re finding it difficult to live in alignment, and that your life lacks some meaning, it’s very likely because you don’t believe anything. You just worship a bunch of values that cannot actually be fully exercised within a single life.
2. You understand and appreciate the world more
I strongly believe that you cannot hate what you understand. I’m not saying that understanding something means you accept or endorse it, on some moral level; only that hatred requires some unknown.
Through reconciling your values — which you can only do by exploring, comparing and contrasting each, finding where their limits are — you will come to despise less of the world. The venomously angry projections fall away.
Interestingly, I’ve found that your level of disagreement with what you observe in the world can go up — and to a greater degree than your hatred goes down — and yet, this is still a positive psychological shift. The toxicity of just a single unit of hatred is so potent that you need near-infinite units of disagreement in order to inflict the same level of negative psychological utility.
3. You can more effectively communicate with other individuals, no matter what they believe
By exploring the tensions that values have — again, in contrast to their isolated worship — you develop a multi-dimensional model of them. This model is precisely what allows you to communicate effectively with other individuals, no matter their particular values.
This has multi-fold benefits itself. Firstly, having the ability to communicate with other parties is a desirable skill, and one which can confer many rewards, including status and resources. Secondly, what separates humans from other organisms is their ability to transmit knowledge across nervous systems. Humans can also enhance their own survivability and reproductive chances compared to other humans by better leveraging this skill. The more expansive the network of nervous systems that you can extract information from, the higher the probability of your success in almost all domains.
So what do you do?
You do things.
This post is generally about the method, and value, of falsification. It is about the cost you suffer, often subtly, by not having a concrete model or accurate beliefs (about the world or yourself).
By doing things you continually invalidate thoughts. You exterminate mental ecosystems that allow mutually incompatible beliefs to co-exist. Beliefs that will only aid in your confusion, and make you a recipient of the consequences of ignoring reality.
To live, rather than exist, is the continuous act of doing things. Travel; read a challenging book; argue and accept; forgive and forget; build a business; strive for mastery in something; date; care and be cared for. This is an incomplete list, but it sheds light on the kinds of activities that can show you how little you know, as well as how to find out who you are.