The Irrationality of Rationality

I had an existential crisis the other night. I had moved into campus and met my new roommates. We were talking about decorating the living room area by putting up posters and fairy lights. I got on amazon looking for posters. And that’s when the ‘fun’ started.

I looked through what must have been thousands of posters, and even though I tried,  I truly couldn’t pick out something fit for hanging in a living room. It was ridiculous.

I kept looking for that perfect thing that would fit in and give a sense of ‘home’ to the white walls. Nothing was good enough. And the few posters I did find, I wasn’t comfortable buying, because what if my roomies didn’t have the same taste as me? What if they didn’t like them? There was just too many variables to take into account.

My roomie saw me struggling and promptly told me to back of the poster-searching. That she would take care of it.

“You don’t need to put that much thought into it, you know? It’s just posters,” she said.

I wanted to agree with her, because somewhere in the back of my mind I knew she was right. But I just looked at her and hyperventilated slightly, my fingers still itching for browsing through just one more page of posters, because maybe the poster would be there.

She shook her head in disbelief. “God, how did you ever choose a college?”

The truth is I didn’t. I stumbled over it and thought ‘Why the hell not?’

I know that’s not what you’re supposed to say. I’m supposed to say that I chose to do this because it is a dream of mine (which it is). But I never dreamt of Pacific Lutheran University. I dreamt of the states. So how did I end up here in Tacoma? A combination of availability, timing and the will to act (I can feel that I’m a student again, because I immediately thought of the garbage can theory).

I spent one of my exams last year, arguing to my professor that it didn’t matter what actions what taken. What was importance was the simple fact that an action was in fact taken. The human mind and its inclination to eliminate cognitive dissonance would soon come up with more than enough reasons for why that particular action was taken.

You didn’t need a rationale beforehand. That would manifest itself soon enough as your need for a personal narrative would take over and create a story that incorporated your actions and made sense.

Even though I know that there is no way to act rational, I always try to do it. I look at all the posters to find the best one (and do you know how many posters amazon has? It’s freaking daunting). I try on all the shoes in the store in my size before buying any (if that). I routinely browse ikea.com and the likes in order to find the perfect bookcase (three year into the search, and it still hasn’t happened [but does that mean I give up and just buy something that is ‘good enough’? Of course not, because I’m stupid like that]. The result? All my books are piled in countless stacks on the floor).

It’s not perfectionism, as my roommate assumed.

It’s not stupidity, as I’m inclined to believe.

It is a deeply irrational attempt at acting rational. Or rather, it’s an attempt to control the world around me by collecting all relevant data (even though that’s impossible).

I think I’ll stop trying to do that. It’s quite stressful.