Stop Being Reasonable: six stories of how we really change our minds

Product Information

The book begins with an account of a rather fascinating experiment that Gordon-Smith conducted, where she asked men who catcalled her on the street why they engaged in that behavior. Many of the men insisted the women liked being catcalled, and Gordon-Smith became fascinated with her inability to convince these men that no, women do not. No amount of personal anecdote or researched evidence could convince these men. Without those specifics, it’s hard to give you the “win-win”. I will say that when your spouse tells you something is going to affect them so negatively that they’d rather leave the marriage, you have to listen. That’s just a condition of being married. The term “win-win” is in this regard a little misleading: marital compromise is not just a matter of weighing one person’s interests against another’s, like strangers in court. There’s a third thing, the marriage itself, which needs to be weighed. Really what you want is a win-win-win. Can you help fill his life with things that offer him belonging, or independence, or a chance to feel clever? That way he’ll have options to turn to, beyond the spaces that reinforce his beliefs, when he wants to feel those things.

Inspiring, moving and perceptive,Stop Being Reasonable is a mind-changing exploration of the murky place where philosophy and real life meet. The less reassuring stuff: it is my suspicion, though it’s difficult to quantify, that online spaces make it a lot easier to get accidentally rusted on to these identities. If forums and YouTube spirals can snare and radicalise adults, it can’t be any easier for a young person to get out of them, especially when they quite like the feeling of being clever enough to see what other people miss. The risk is he might really upset some girls around him who are also in their formative years. Jeewon Yoo is expected to graduate this year with a Ph.D. in English. He served as the lead instructor for “ Art of Comedy” and as an AI for “Sally Rooney and Her Contemporaries.” Some of them are stories of revelation, like the moment when Susie discovered her husband had been telling a criminal lie since he was twelve years old and began to fear for herself and her young child, or when Peter opened his ailing mother’s mail for her and discovered she wasn’t who he’d thought she was, or when Dylan quit the strict apocalypse-heralding religious sect he’d been raised in after more than twenty years as a believer. Others are stories about not knowing what to believe, like the shifting cognitive sands Upper-Class English Gentleman Alex found himself in when he finished a stint on a reality TV program that had trained him as a London bouncer, only to realise he was no longer entirely sure which of those two identities he’d been faking. Or there’s the confusion former Navy pilot Nicole has spent years in after alleging as a six-year-old that her mother had abused her, then reading an exposé about her own case many years later that argued the abuse may never have occurred.Overall, I agree with the author that people are motivated by emotion, relationships, and their sense of self (especially the person's values). Few people are truly motivated by reason. I think that's because the question of how a person should live their life is not a question that can be answered logically. There is no logical formula for living a good life. Given the choice of one or the other, I think just about everyone would choose to be happy over being reasonable.

Eleanor says: Listen, I’m a writer and my best friend just bought a house, so I know the place you’re coming from, and from that place I’m telling you, eye to eye: when the pandemic is over you have to leave your parents’ house. I will soon have to tell my wife that her mother texted, and that she has Alzheimer’s. Do I also have to tell her about the part with the letters? Or, for the sake of peace, can I skip that part? I don’t feel comfortable with it, but I don’t want my wife to be hurt again.Keeping this in mind might help you feel what you’re feeling, without reproach. You’re not just being mean, or taking an irrational dislike of a perfectly pleasant person. You’re feeling that this relationship isn’t strong enough for the tests it’s being put through – and in a way, why would it be? Professor of Philosophy Sarah McGrath recalls watching Gordon-Smith deliver “the most effective undergraduate lecture I have ever seen anyone give anywhere, ever, on any topic. I believe that I saw Princeton undergraduate students fall in love with philosophy there before my eyes that morning.” When we ask that, we start to stress over all the possible ways we could improve things. Improvement is in principle never-ending, so the stress of trying to achieve it is also never-ending. If I lived elsewhere, would things feel a little better? What about if I had some more money, or a different job, or a different schedule or hobbies? Around each corner, after each tweak, the promise of a slightly better life.