The difference between Selfishness and Self-Centeredness.

Well, hello and good morning, afternoon, and evening readers. I truly hope you’re swimming in the pleasantries of life rather than keeping your head above water in the unpleasant swamp. HOPE = Hold On Pain Ends. And there’s generally a learning or personal growth that comes after the storm of every painful experience, even if it’s simply greater empathy and compassion for others.

Today’s the day to learn or remember the fallacies of the human mind. I am not as smart as I look, haha. Have you heard of heuristics before? In cognitive psychology, a heuristic is a mental “shortcut” that allows people to solve problems and make judgments quickly and efficiently. They can be very helpful in many situations, but they can also lead to cognitive biases, errors in thinking, and even perhaps without the mental shortcut, our thinking is often filled to the brim with cognitive distortions, assumptions and fallacies (faults). Awareness raising is probably the first step to identify our own cognitive traps and also identify them in others. Cognitive errors are natural – we all have them. Below are some cognitive distortions/errors to be aware of when we reflect on our interactions with people, during personal reflection, and when making meaningful decisions or judgements.

• ALL-OR-NOTHING THINKING (aka. POLARISED THINKING, SPLITTING, and BLACK-AND-WHITE THINKING: is extreme thinking i.e., the error in a person’s thinking to bring together the dichotomy of both positive and negative qualities of the self and others into a cohesive, realistic whole. It is a common defense mechanism. Before you think “I must have really shitty thinking because I do this ALL the time”, give yourself a break. If you’re thinking in black and white, you probably internalised this from social media, television and movies, your family of origin and the broader society. Be mindful of using extreme, dichotomist terms, such as “failure”, “success”, “best”, “worst”, “freezing”, “boiling”, “everything”, and “nothing”. If you think “I’m a terrible person”, that is bullshit and inaccurate. You may have behaved terribly for a period of time towards yourself, to someone else, or towards some “thing”, but we cannot discount all the NON-terrible qualities about you. We must THINK in DIALECTICS i.e., the ability to view issues from multiple perspectives with reason and wisdom or in other words being able to have two contradictory viewpoints, where a greater truth emerges from their interplay. The truth is, if you think you’re a terrible person, there’s also virtuous person in there too.

• OVERGENERALISTION: The words “always”, “every” and “never” come into play here, and you have an unshakable “rule” or “conviction” about yourself, something, or someone, based on one or two incidences. Overgeneralising is “a cognitive distortion in which an individual views a single event as an invariable RULE, so that, for example, failure at accomplishing one task will predict an endless pattern of defeat in all tasks.” Coming into the present moment and being specific can be helpful if you are someone who overgeneralises. You may also want to ask yourself if what your saying is the really the truth. Is it really accurate or correct. There’s an assumption that because something has happened once or a few times that it’s like going to happen every time. Remember, the words “always”, “every”, and “never” frequently appear in this cognitive “trap”. I encourage you to look at the big picture and ask yourself if what you’re saying or thinking is accurate. Overgeneralisations tend to be vague and board statements e.g., “I always get every red light”. Perhaps this is part of our evolutionary negativity bias. We tend to notice the so-called “bad” and overlook the so-called “good”. If you find yourself using overgeneralisations that suggest a future prediction (e.g., “I’ll never get a partner) … use some humour – you may have big balls but neither one of them are crystal – VEEP. If there is some truth to unusually frequent and specific situations that are making your life unpleasant, validate them, talk to someone, and brainstorm some solutions. We humans have plenty of blind spots that others can see sometimes.

• MENTAL FILTER: is considered to be the opposite to OVERGENERALISATION the mental filter takes one small event and focuses on it exclusively, filtering out anything else that’s relevant. Filtering out the positive and focusing on the negative can have a detrimental impact on your mental well-being. Filtering out the so-called “negative” can also make one a bit hubris (excessive pride or self-confidence), arrogant, vain and conceited – and then you’re just a stone’s throw away from narcissism.

• PERSONALISATION AND BLAME: Personalization and blame is a cognitive distortion whereby you entirely blame yourself, or someone else, for a situation that in reality involved many factors that were out of your control. I think this is a symptom of our wounded ego, or simply just the ego. As human’s we are egocentric, like children, and we often think that circumstances in our environment are solely because of our influence. For example, your friend isn’t behaving like they usually do, so it must be because you have done something.

Again, personalisation is an egocentric error in cognition. “Of course it has to do with me”, we think. It makes sense that we personalise things. We are the star of our own show, our own narrative. If you personalise something, it means we’ve directly influenced it – we are the primary cause. This may elicit internal pain, shame or guilt, so what’s the pay-off? Personalisation is a cognitive error that offers us the illusion of control e.g., “If we caused it then we will learn how to not cause it again, and maybe even undo what we have caused”. If you think about it, personalising something is something children do. Remember, there are infinite variables in any situation to take full credit of the outcome. That being said, it is responsible and mature to reflect objectively on the influence of our behaviour and what we can learn about our shortcomings.

Blame deserves it’s own blog post but in short, it can be defined as a defence mechanism to protect the self from feeling some unwanted emotion or thinking something unacceptable in relation to the “self”. Blaming provides a way of devaluing others, an the pay-off or reinforcement the blamer receives is a sense of superiority. It protects our ego from feeling responsible for something, and protects us from feeling guilt or shame. Perfectionists are very good at blaming others, and themselves. Even if you genuinely think faulting someone or something is valid, remember that no one is perfect. Recognise that you are human and others are fallible humans. As they say in recovery, “there is a bit of bad in the best of us and a bit of good in the worst of us“. We may have internalised from society and culture that we couldn’t make mistakes (because we receive “punishment” for making mistakes) but we must move beyond that now. As adults, we need to get real. Validate your experience because it may be very disappointing when we don’t meet others or our own expectations. We must nurture and care for the wounded child. Lets attend and befriend to our shortcomings and accept we are not superhuman. Learn to expect you will make mistakes. Failure is kind of an illusion, isn’t it? Or maybe a social construct? “Failure” is really learning – replace ‘failure’ with the word ‘feedback’. Would a cat or dog blame them self for a “mistake”? In the minds of animals, there’s no such concept as failure or a mistake.

Here’s a link to website “simplypsychology” that discusses a theory called Attribution Theory, an idea about how people explain the causes of behaviour and events: Attribution Theory – Situational vs Dispositional | Simply Psychology

Picture a runaway trolley hurtling down a track. Five people are tied to the rails ahead. On a side track, there is one person — a child. You are standing at the lever. Pull it, and the child dies. Leave it, and five adults are killed. What do you do?

This is the Trolley Problem — a thought experiment introduced by philosopher Philippa Foot in 1967 and endlessly debated ever since. It seems, at first glance, like a maths question dressed up in moral clothing. But the more honestly you sit with it, the more it reveals about something far deeper: what we actually believe about human life, responsibility, and the ethics of inaction… and perhaps the need for substantial more information in this hypothetical. We may also need to ask questions about the assumptions of the question, such as, why do we assume five lives are worth more than one when no measurable value can be placed on a life?

Can we really put a number on a life?

The utilitarian answer is clean and confident: pull the lever. Five lives outweigh one. The arithmetic is straightforward. But this assumes something that many of us instinctively resist — that human lives can be compared, ranked, or traded against one another like items on a balance sheet.

Philosophers call this the problem of incommensurability: the idea that some values simply cannot be reduced to a common scale. Five dollars is worth more than one dollar. But is five lives worth more than one life? The moment we accept that framing, we have already conceded something profound — that people are, in some sense, fungible. Interchangeable. Countable.

Most of us feel, in our bones, that this is wrong. And yet we struggle to articulate why.

“The moment we start counting lives,
we have already made a philosophical choice —
one with consequences far beyond any trolley.”

Context is not a distraction — it is the point

Consider what changes when we add detail to the dilemma. The five adults are elderly, estranged from family, and living rough. The one person is a child with parents who adore them, siblings, a whole life ahead. Does this change the calculus? Should it?

Many philosophers would say we are introducing emotional noise — that the exercise demands we strip away context to test our principles in their purest form. But there is a compelling counter-argument: stripping away context does not purify the dilemma. It destroys it. Because in the real world, a human life does not exist in isolation. It exists within a web of relationships, responsibilities, histories, and futures. The loss of one child reverberates through a family — through parents, siblings, grandparents, friends — in ways that may echo for generations. The loss of five people who have drifted from the world still has weight, still has meaning, but the ripples spread differently.

This is not sentimentality. It is, arguably, a more honest and sophisticated form of moral reasoning than the cold arithmetic of classical utilitarianism.

The Epistemic Objection is a well-recognized challenge. If consequentialism tells you to produce the best outcomes, but outcomes are radically unknowable, then the theory may be practically action-guiding in name only. You can never actually know you’re doing the right thing, which some philosophers argue renders it useless as a decision procedure even if it’s correct as a moral theory.

This connects to what philosophers call the “cluelessness problem”, articulated rigorously by philosopher William MacAskill and others. The argument runs roughly:

• Consequentialism requires you to consider all consequences
• Long-run consequences of any action are deeply uncertain and potentially vast
• Therefore we are systematically clueless about what consequentialism actually requires of us
• This is not a minor inconvenience — it may be a fundamental flaw

The Responses Consequentialists Make

To be fair, consequentialists have replies:

• Expected value theory — you act on probabilities, not certainties. You use the best available estimate of outcomes
• Rule consequentialism — instead of calculating act by act, you follow rules that generally produce good outcomes, sidestepping some epistemic chaos
• Satisficing (good enough) consequentialism — you don’t need to maximise, just produce outcomes good enough

Is doing nothing really doing nothing?

Here is where the thought experiment takes its sharpest turn. Many people, when confronted with the trolley problem, feel that not pulling the lever is somehow morally safer — that inaction absolves them of responsibility. After all, they did not cause the trolley to exist. They did not tie anyone to the tracks.

But this reasoning deserves serious scrutiny. If you are standing at the lever, you have agency. You have full knowledge of the situation. You have the physical ability to intervene. At the moment you choose not to act, you are not opting out of the moral situation — you are making a deliberate choice within it. The mental process is identical to pulling the lever: you weigh your options and select one. The only difference is whether your hand moves.

The philosopher Peter Singer pushed this point hard with a simpler scenario: if you walked past a child drowning in a shallow pond and chose not to help because you didn’t want to ruin your clothes, almost everyone would consider you morally culpable. The water caused the drowning. But your character is revealed by what you were willing — and unwilling — to do.

“Inaction, when chosen consciously by someone with agency and the ability to intervene, is not a neutral act. It is a moral choice — and it tells us something real about who we are.”

This connects to the concept of moral cowardice: avoiding a difficult choice not because inaction is right, but because acting feels uncomfortable, costly, or risky. Virtue ethics — the tradition stretching back to Aristotle — holds that our character is defined not just by what we do, but by what we are willing to do, and what we are prepared to let happen when we could have stopped it.

Where we draw the line — and why it matters

There is another dimension to this worth sitting with: how we decide which living things deserve moral consideration in the first place. If we accept that all life has inherent value, where does that obligation end? Plants are alive. So are insects. So are fish, pigs, chimpanzees.

One principled place to draw the line is at sentience — the capacity to suffer, to experience fear, to feel pain. A heart, a brain, a nervous system suggest an inner life that a plant, however alive, does not possess. This is not a perfect boundary. But it is a reasoned one. And it connects back to the trolley problem in a meaningful way: if what matters morally is the capacity for suffering and the existence of relational bonds, then the texture of each life on those tracks — not just the number — is morally relevant information.

What the trolley problem is really asking

The Trolley Problem endures not because it has a correct answer, but because it refuses to let us hide. It exposes the gap between what we say we believe and what we are actually prepared to do. It forces us to confront whether our moral intuitions are consistent, and whether the frameworks we use — utilitarian calculation, duty-based ethics, virtue and character — can survive contact with a real dilemma.

The most honest response is not to solve the problem, but to feel its full weight. To resist the urge to reduce it to arithmetic. To acknowledge that human lives are not units of currency, that context is not a distraction, and that the decision to do nothing is itself a decision — one that reflects, for better or worse, something true about the person standing at the lever.

There’s always a “trolley” coming.

The trolley problem doesn’t tell us what to do; it tells you something about who you are and forces genuine reflection. That’s closer to virtue ethics territory, ironically — where the question shifts from what produces the best outcome to what does this choice reveal about, and do to, my character.

We all know the feeling of eating the last Tim Tam even though we said we’d stop, or putting off the gym even though we know we’ll feel better after. There’s a simple psychological framework behind this tug-of-war, and it’s more nuanced than “willpower” or “laziness.”

Four combinations, not two

Most people think of this as one axis — instant vs delayed — but really there are two separate questions: when something happens, and whether it’s a reward or a cost. That gives four combinations:

• Instant gratification: reward now (a cigarette, a scroll through social media, a splurge on payday)
• Delayed cost: the price paid later (lung damage, lost hours, an empty bank account)
• Instant cost: effort or discomfort now (a hard training session, saying no to dessert)
• Delayed gratification: the pay-off later (fitness, health, savings)

These naturally pair up in everyday life — instant gratification tends to travel with a delayed cost (gluttony, addiction, procrastination), and instant cost tends to travel with delayed gratification (discipline, exercise, saving). But they’re not the same thing by definition; they’re just common bundles. Sometimes you get gratification with barely any real cost (an afternoon nap), or cost with barely any real reward (over-saving to the point of never enjoying your money).

Why the future feels so much less real

The underlying mechanism is called temporal discounting — our tendency to value a reward less the further away it sits. Offer someone $50 today or $100 in a year, and plenty will take the $50. The future reward gets “discounted” in the mind, even though it’s objectively worth more. This isn’t a flaw exclusive to people struggling with addiction or avoidance — everyone discounts the future to some degree. What differs from person to person is how steeply.

A more specific quirk sitting inside this is present bias — an extra, disproportionate pull toward anything happening right now, over and above normal discounting. The classic sign of it is a preference reversal: someone might happily choose $100 in 31 days over $50 in 30 days when both options are off in the future. But offer them $50 today versus $100 tomorrow, and many flip to taking the smaller amount immediately. Nothing about the maths changed — only whether “now” was on the table. This is the same mechanism behind grand plans made the night before that evaporate the next morning: the plan looked easy when “now” was still hypothetical.

Why does this happen? Economists originally assumed we discount the future smoothly and consistently — a steady, predictable decline in value the further out a reward sits. Real behaviour doesn’t work that way. Instead, people follow what’s called a hyperbolic discounting curve — value declines really fast for anything in the near future (i.e., pushing a reward from today to next week costs it a lot of its appeal) then flattens out for anything further away. But pushing a reward from five years away to six years away barely changes how appealing it feels at all. The decline is steep early and flat later. That steep early drop is what makes “right now” so magnetic, and the flat tail is why consequences six months away can feel almost as unreal as consequences five years away, even though they’re nothing alike in real terms.

Where this shows up in society

This isn’t just an economics quirk — it explains a lot of everyday human struggle:

• Addiction runs almost entirely on this pattern: an intensely immediate reward (a drink, a hit, a bet) paired with a cost that’s not just delayed but sitting on that flat, barely-felt part of the curve.
• Avoidance behaviours (procrastination, dodging a hard conversation, skipping medical checkups) work in reverse — the relief of avoiding discomfort is instant, while the cost of avoidance quietly compounds somewhere out on the flat tail.
• Overeating or “gluttony” fits the same shape — the pleasure of eating is immediate and vivid; weight gain or health decline is real but distant and abstract, so it barely registers in the moment of choosing.
• Under-saving and impulse spending are the financial version — a purchase feels good today; retirement or a rainy-day fund is decades away and easy to discount to near zero.

Why this matters practically

The useful reframe here is that struggling with this isn’t a personal failing or a lack of insight — it’s the human valuation system doing exactly what it evolved to do, just more steeply in some people than others. That points toward practical fixes that work with the curve rather than fighting it: shrinking the delay before a good choice pays off (visible progress, milestone rewards), making the cost of a bad choice show up sooner rather than later (a streak, a check-in, immediate feedback), or removing the in-the-moment choice altogether through precommitment (automatic savings transfers, not keeping temptation in the house). Trying to simply convince someone to “care more” about the distant future tends not to work, because the problem was never a lack of caring — it’s that the future is quietly, structurally, worth less to the mind than the present.