Gift Giving

I recently wrote an article about gifts that crosses over into this realm, so I’ll just summarize the main points — you can check out the original article for more detail. Let’s lay out a hypothetical situation. You are looking for a gift for someone — for Christmas or a birthday or something else. You know roughly what your budget is, and you end up finding something you don’t think this person has and buying it for them. They unwrap it at the big event and give you a huge smile and hug, and many thanks. Great success! Clearly, they loved the gift. Next time you give a gift, you think, you should aim to do something just like this, since it was obviously effective.

But wait. Was this really a success, or could it possibly be just an illusion? What if you gave the person something that didn’t really add much to their lives, but they kept anyways just because it was a thoughtful gift and they didn’t want to offend you? Now suddenly you have given them a burden — something that takes up space in their home and adds nothing to their happiness. That same space could be used for things that make them happy, and the money and utility of the item could be serving them or someone else better. This is not only not positive, it’s negative. And there you are with a smile on your face thinking you did something nice for someone. And when they smiled back and thanked you, this belief was reinforced — you will go on to do it in a similar way for others in the future. What a disaster!

This is a common situation and a difficult problem for many. See the Pragmatic Life article “On Gifts” for the way I personally am trying to solve it.

Detecting Success Illusions

Illusions of success are often strong, and very difficult to detect. As a result, most people do not notice them at all except for some very subtle indications, or much later on in life. That being said, there are certain core themes that tend to be behind success illusions which, once you are aware of them, you can watch for more carefully. Each of these themes are rooted in a specific evolutionary human behavior which occurs without thought and in modern society can often be harmful. Let’s look at the examples from earlier in this post to contextualize.

The Illusion of Progress

The first example about learning programming is a gamification trick. Gamification and progress illusions are discussed in more depth in a future article I’m working on, but in essence the trick is that people measure their success against an artificial progress bar rather than their real-life goals. The trick to escaping this type of illusion is to be more mindful of both the purpose of your tasks, and the form that the progress indications come in.

Video games serve as a great example of gamification and progress illusions. In order to avoid being deluded by progress illusions, first, when you play a video game, you must consider the purpose. Why am I playing this game? Perhaps it is to relax, or to enjoy time with a friend, etc. Then, of course, you must weigh this against your other goals and determine how much time you’d like to spend on it. Relaxation and play are important at all ages, so just because something is not “productive” does not mean it doesn’t have a place in your life.

Second, you must carefully consider whether indicated progress is real or manufactured. That is, if there’s a progress bar through the levels of a video game, this is a manufactured form of progress. The only place the progress counts is in the game itself, not your actual life, and it’s not an indicator that you have built any form of real-world skill. That being said, playing a video game can actually build real-world skills — it’s just that the manufactured in-game progress indicators are not accurate measures of that skill’s development. Let’s say you wanted to see if gaming was increasing your hand-eye coordination. You could measure this precisely with a little home science. Play no video games for a month, but take a hand-eye coordination test each week, and see how your progress evolves. Now the next month, play video games normally, for however many hours you feel is appropriate. Do the same thing with the hand-eye coordination tests. Did your results increase when playing video games? There are other more fuzzy tests you can do as well. For example, experience playing particular video game that your friends enjoy might lead to more depth in social interactions. Art and animation styles in video games and also be creative inspirations and could, for example, lead you towards a new style in graphic design or art. For these examples, you would need to judge situationally and make a rough estimate.