Nope, people make decisions, and money is just an idea or, piece of paper that is traded in exchange for goods and services. Yet, we tend to attribute and give money power it doesn’t possess when we personify and take various perspectives about what it is and how it works. We have tendencies to want to confirm our beliefs about money, we often seek out and come up with more reasons why money rules the world and controls us.
Because we believe that we seek out and find more reasons why that seems to be true.
However, It’s all about the perspective you take that gives the belief control over you and your life. The more you believe that money rules the world, the more you seek out information that supports that belief, such as choosing to read news articles about how corrupt politicians take millions of dollars from corporations to change various policies. If you read an article similar to this every day, you’ll keep cementing that belief into your mind.
While just on the next page there are articles about how hundreds of millions of dollars were donated to a cancer research company that just made a huge breakthrough in curing one specific kind of cancer as a direct result of the massive donation.
The more you look to support your belief system the more you also don’t even consciously see the articles like the one about cancer research, your mind subconsciously seeks out the ones that support what you believe. So it’s not completely your fault, in this way the mind is working against you, these cognitive biases sure are tricky bastards!
“This is why change is so difficult”
… or is that just another confirmation bias?!
There are so many mental limitations that hold us back when we are trying to change, and the confirmation bias is one of the trickiest because we have urges to “feel” right. So we search to confirm what we think we already know. Even when, sometimes especially when, there is clear evidence supporting the other side.
A simple example is people who watch FOX news tend to only watch FOX news and conservative media. They wouldn’t even consider watching VOX or another liberal news station. And vice versa. When in reality, if both parties watched the other person’s news source they would better understand the opposing side’s beliefs and possibly even get a new perspective on a matter they normally wouldn’t have considered.
The real question, however, is how does this affect us while organizing?
We tend to get stuck in our ways. We created a system, and that system has been working for years, so why change it? Changing it could make it worse, this system works fine, we think to ourselves.
This may lead us to list more reasons why it’s a good idea to stick with the system as it is, we confirm our bias about the system and run away from changing it.
Let’s say, for instance, in our closet we have always just color coded our clothing and separate shirts from pants, and that’s it. It’s worked fine, you can find stuff relatively easily, you always know where things go back to, and it looks pretty. But could that be just more confirming a bias.
Maybe if we instead tried sorting the clothes first by what occasion we wear them for, work, casual, working out, going to Vegas, then by frequency of use. Then if we used color hangers to sort each category out so we know exactly where to look, we may be able to find things 1) more easily and quickly saving you time in the morning, and 2) you’d get a much better idea of what you actually wear, plus it still looks really neat and tidy.
Doing it the new way will be challenging at first, implementing any new system typically is, at least until you build the new habits to support the new system, then it can become 10X better than the old way of doing things.
So, just like it can help if we shift our perspectives about money by actively seeking out new information we may not normally agree with, it can also help us to reorganize and make our closets more efficient by challenging biases that confirm beliefs we hold.
It’s not fun, and it’s not easy to shatter these silly mirrors we hold up to our minds, but it can most definitely benefit us in the long run. Often accepting the truth and altering our actions can lead us to experience small doses of daily bliss as a result from creating new, better systems in our closets and homes.