Ever noticed how long people take to order something at a restaurant, but on the other hand can very quickly settle on purchasing a house or a car, or getting into college for Americans? Those purchases are so big that they essentially dictate your financial situation for decades just by themselves. And yet, people treat them so casually, what is going on?
The fact that they are so big might be the precise reason why people treat them so casually. The term "hyperobject" refers to situations or events which are far too big, in time, space and complexity, for simple worldviews and models based on local reality to be accurate. That loose definition might be somewhat inaccurate to its original usage, but for me the key aspect relevant here is that hyperobjects are outside the sphere of embodied reality, which is to say, what we can feel with our guts, and instead have to use our mind to make sense of.
As sad as it is to say, most people do not know how to think, which isn't surprising because the institutions within society do not benefit at all from people who genuinely think as individuals, since obedience and specialized competence are far more important there. As a result, most people's capacity to make sense of hyperobjects, such as global existential problems, misaligned incentive structures and the deep self-deception of the ego and the systems it builds, is basically non-existent.
I wouldn't lump big purchases, such as a house or a car or a degree, under the term "hyperobject", though they are definitely big enough for the somatic intuition we use to make most decisions to be gone. For instance, tell someone that their house purchase of $250.000 now went up to $260.000 and they won't really bat an eye. But the difference is still $10.000, which matters a great deal no matter the proportional increase it corresponds to, because it corresponds to the same amount of time spent working at the end of the day. To further emphasize the absurdity of that decision-making, the people who do not bat an eye at the $10.000 increase would likely spend many hours over the course of a year just to save a few hundred dollars in total over small things here and there.
To give other examples, notice how we can have a good mental image of how long a soccer field is, because human beings frequently run along it, but then try to imagine how long a 5km or a 10km road is, and see how your ability to imagine it in its entirety is pretty much gone. You might know that the 10km road is twice as long as the 5km one, but can you even feel any of them, the same way you can feel the length of the soccer field?
When our somatic intuition is gone, we need to turn to our mind to compute a result, as opposed to being able to feel roughly what it is. Can you guess, at a glance, how many years of work you need to acquire $250.000? How about actually computing that answer? Were your two answers close to one another? Probably not, right? And even if you were able to guess roughly how many years you need to work to acquire the $250.000, are you able to feel how long those years are, the same way you can feel how long a minute is? Put in that context, the additional $10.000 can be a very significant amount of time, especially if you don't like your job, like most people do.
Unsurprisingly, our society benefits a lot from the loss of the somatic intuition. The more disembodied purchases are—for instance, using a debit or credit card as opposed to using cash which would have to physically leave your wallet—the more people tend to spend. The solution as always consists in slowing the fuck down, especially for big purchases. Your money is ultimately your time, which is your life, and financial wisdom is realizing that being good at the big purchases is so much more valuable than focusing on how to save pennies on the small ones.
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2024-07-22