Cognitive dissonance is the perception of contradictory information and the mental toll of it. Relevant items of information include a person's actions, feelings, ideas, beliefs, values, and things in the environment. Cognitive dissonance is typically experienced as psychological stress when persons participate in an action that goes against one or more of those things. (source: Wikipedia)
In March of 2016, I sat with my dad during the last days of his life on earth. In his final hours, he was no longer conscious or responsive in any way that was apparent to me, but I kept talking to him, my hand resting on his hand or on his chest. I sat with him as his breathing grew shallower, slower, and more labored and eventually stopped.
I had that experience, and then I returned to my job at a very large software company. I’m sure I took a few days of bereavement leave in between, but that didn’t make work feel any less absurd.
This is a pretty common story of cognitive dissonance. In the wake of a loss, it’s common to experience feelings and thoughts that are elevated in a way, transcending normal life. We ponder the significance of our days and our relationships. We might wonder about consciousness and what happens to it when we shed our bodies. Or we might simply feel big feelings as we grapple with the weight of the loss. Meanwhile (speaking for software industry people) we attend meetings where everyone is very invested in whether combining step 2 and step 3 of a thing will increase conversions by a quarter of a percent. It’s absurd that we’re supposed to act like we care about this stuff.
It helps that a death in the family is something coworkers feel like they can acknowledge. Sorry for your loss, they will say, which does something to bridge the distance between deep thoughts and mundane meetings.
Other kinds of life-and-death events go unmentioned. I felt a deep heartache when I learned about the fires in Maui that raged through the town of Lahaina a few weeks ago. I felt a similar ache when I heard about the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, TX (my heart still aches for Uvalde). These are examples that come quickly to mind. It would not be hard to come up with many more, but we don’t talk about these events at work. If Lahaina or Uvalde came up at all, it was but a blip, perhaps in the context of donating money in support of victims.
There are rare exceptions that do seem to stop the machine for a minute, but only for a minute. 9/11 is the most obvious one I can think of. More recently, there was the killing of George Floyd and the January 6 insurrection. It’s possible that I’m including these latter two events because they happened during the pandemic. Working from home, I personally paused my job to process each of them, ditching some meetings and other duties. I can’t speak for my company or my coworkers or the larger “machine” I’m referring to.
It’s weird to have big feelings about something and act like you don’t. It’s weird to witness everyone around you acting like everything is fine, the same as it ever was. Acting is exactly the right word for it, for it’s in those moments that corporate life feels most like a performance. It seems insane that this is normal and expected.
It is in fact fundamentally weird to behave this way because until very recently in our existence as a species, humans lived in clans and villages where everyone knew everyone. In that kind of environment, a big tragedy stopped normal life entirely and then brought everyone together. It was the only thing everyone talked about for a while. A big enough tragedy would become lore.
On the other hand, to know about a shooting two time zones away is a very new phenomenon for humans. I’ve never been to Uvalde, nor do I have personal connections to anyone there, yet my heart aches. My heart aches for those families far away and unknown to me, but it would be utterly bizarre to ask for time off from work to grieve what happened to them. What am I supposed to do with these feelings?
To alleviate some of the psychological pain associated with all this cognitive dissonance, I could rage at the news media. I could say the news manipulated me into having these feelings about a faraway tragedy that I wouldn’t otherwise know about at all. A deplorable and extreme way to seek relief from cognitive dissonance would be to claim the shooting didn’t happen at all, that all mainstream news is designed to manipulate us, which of course was Alex Jones’s response to Sandy Hook.
Of course news media isn’t designed to manipulate us in the way that Alex Jones and his fans claim, but it is built on editorial choices that have an obvious commercial bias, which produces more cognitive dissonance. I’m referring to the fact that most news is supported by advertising, asking for your attention, clicks, and ultimately your money. A television segment about the Lahaina wildfires cuts to a genuinely funny GEICO spot, followed by another commercial about a new way to track your car’s resale value in real time. What are you supposed to do with the feelings you feel as you jolt between wildfires and the funny reptile spokesman? And should you be curious about your car’s resale value right now? It’s all so jarring.
When I suggested in my previous piece that modernity has broken us, this is a big part of what I was talking about.
In a lot of ways humans are flourishing like never before. We are freer than ever from disease, famine, and war. Yet rates of depression, anxiety, suicide, and addiction have risen and risen over the last 50 years. Social scientists are mystified, and they point to things like social media, political polarization, and massive income inequality against rising costs of living. These are plausible factors for sure, but in some ways I see them as either more causes of or responses to cognitive dissonance.
Even the fact of human flourishing is a source of cognitive dissonance. I see driverless cars proliferating in my city, and I can engage in weirdly compelling conversations with an AI. In some ways I can envision the techno-utopia that all of that is supposedly moving us towards. But, for example we also just had the hottest summer on record. The ocean in Florida is like bathwater. Saguaros are shriveling. It’s too hot for photosynthesis in some places. Biomes around the world are crashing. We are barreling towards two opposing futures at once. How are we supposed to reconcile them?
I posit that rates of depression, anxiety and suicide are up because we are all in constant psychological pain related to cognitive dissonance, as we’re bombarded from all sides with modernity that’s causing it, unable to find relief. Suburban life is isolating by design. Sealed up in McMansions, millions of Americans commute to work (or maybe just connect over zoom) to spend the whole day with people they don’t really care about and don’t really talk to. Most people are not aware of their own psychological pain, because people aren’t self-aware in general or because life keeps us all very busy. And, lacking awareness and emotional intelligence and good support systems, we attempt to deal with our pain in all kinds of toxic and damaging ways.
Addiction. Conspiracy theories. Cults. Abusive behavior and violence. Internet trolling, Obsessive attention seeking. Workaholism. Deflection and projection. All of that is about pain relief.
Healthier forms of pain relief are real connections to other people, meaningful work, art, even escaping into quality entertainment. Last night I went to a concert with my wife and some good friends to enjoy some good vibes music. The crowd was young. Everyone was dancing and singing. That’s good pain relief.
Other healthy forms of pain relief don’t actually rid us of of the pain but rather help us assimilate it. Mindfulness, for example, means noticing the pain with a kind of loving curiosity. Tara Brach created the RAIN technique—recognize, allow, investigate, and nurture—which has helped many people process trauma and psychological pain. Good therapy is another mode of healthy pain relief, offering techniques for dealing with difficult thoughts and feelings. Looking inward is key to long term relief. A healthy relationship with our own pain makes us wiser and more compassionate, and that’s how we heal each other.
Beside the point
I mentioned that driverless cars are proliferating around San Francisco, and it occurred to me that I don’t know what you’re supposed to do if you get in a minor fender bender with one. If you Google this question, you’ll get articles about who’s responsible for an accident caused by a driverless car (the company) and how to get compensation. But let’s say you just bump fenders with a Waymo at a four-way stop sign. What do you do at the scene when there’s no driver to exchange insurance details with?
You and I worked together on 9/11, and it's the last time I can remember when the clock TRULY stopped at work. Even in 2016, when I took the bus to work in downtown San Francisco the morning it was clear Trump had won the election and everyone looked totally dazed, I booted up and got going like all was the same in the world.
Somehow I've fully avoided the anomie and depression that comes from the spot-on everyday dissonance you mention but it just means something about my own physiology or brain chemistry or coping skills. It doesn't mean it's not totally real - and even logical - for so many others. The key, and I'm not sure of this, is whether it's truly unique to our age and times or part of a continuum, and we're just too self-centered and/or frankly UNABLE to know if this is the way it's always been.