16 July 2015

Do You Know the Stakes of the Bets you Place? - Meconomics

This blogpost is a continuation to:

Reality in a Bubble – Meconomics
Inflating Reality Much? – Meconomics

Read the previous posts for context.





I ended off my previous post with the following:

“When we start reacting inside ourselves (in the experiential reality/dimension) to what we hear/see in our physical reality, we change the way we perceive reality. If your partner forgot to buy toothpaste, then in physical reality, this means: your partner forgot to buy toothpaste. (Okay, that may sound silly, but it’s actually so silly that most of us don’t recognize how complicated we make our lives.) In your experiential reality, if your partner forgot to buy toothpaste, it can mean: “My partner doesn’t care about me”; “My partner is unreliable”; “I have to think of everything in this relationship”, “I do so much for him/her and he/she can’t even do this one little thing for me”.

So – we have this nasty habit of inflating something that happens in our physical reality through interpreting it and reacting to it in our experiential reality – making it seem bigger than it actually is. I’m sure you can relate to such moments, they occur so often that we have come to accept them as ‘normal’ – but let’s continue looking at them a bit further so we can really grasp and understand what it is we’re doing in such moments and how it creates a direct line of responsibility from ourselves to the phenomenon of speculative bubbles and the consequences they create in people’s lives.”

We can identify three stages when it comes to inflating things in our reality:
1.    the start/onset,
2.    the process of inflation,
3.    the popping of the bubble.

Let’s look at each of these stages in turn so we can really go into the nitty-gritty of how this works, what we participate in, how we actually create these bubbles. When it comes to meconomics – the better we understand ourselves, how these things work in our own personal lives on a small scale, the more empowered we are to understand and change how the same is manifested on a large scale in the economy.


1.    The Start/Onset of Inflation Bubbles in our Lives

We’ve looked at how we’re working with two realities or dimensions of reality – the physical reality and the experiential reality. We saw how, when something happens in our physical reality, that we pick up with our physical senses, we often INTERPRET these events to have a particular ‘meaning’. So – you’ve got your physical reality, you’ve got your physical senses like hearing, touch, smell, etc with which you take in information of what happens around you – but then – you also have an inner experiential reality through which the information is ‘filtered’ and where you add additional meaning and interpretations to what happens in your physical reality.

So, if we take the fictional example of your partner forgetting to buy toothpaste – what you pick up through your physical senses is just that: your partner forgot to buy toothpaste. But now – that information gets filtered through your inner experiential reality, which can be for instance all the memories of when he forgot to do something, or all the memories where you went out of your way to do something for him when he asked you to – and then together with that – all the experiences, emotions, feelings you’ve had in those previous memories. So – even though the information that is ‘coming in’ from your environment is: “your partner forgot to buy toothpaste” – what you end up experiencing and perceiving can be “he’s such an ass”.

(Little side-note: I’m here using the viewpoint of a female and the partner who forgot to buy the toothpaste as being a male to cut down on having to write him/her – but obviously, you can switch the roles and genders around, it goes both ways. So, if you’re a guy reading this, then just imagine the partner being a woman who forgot to buy toothpaste and the eventual experience being “she’s such a bitch”.)

What is interesting about this, is that it is actually a form of speculating. What is speculating? It is to “form a theory or conjecture about a subject without firm evidence.” In this example, the conclusion or theory is that ‘your partner is an ass’ and that’s why he forgot to buy tooth paste. You don’t have any firm evidence, because you’re just using your own memories and experiences as a reference and assuming that they provide you with solid proof, but they don’t really. In terms of what happened ‘right now’, in that ‘that’ moment – all you’ve got is that your partner forgot to buy toothpaste, everything else that you think about it or feel about it, is based on speculation.

When it comes to speculating in the financial market, the same happens – you’re looking at different indicators and factors, what direction things seem to be moving in – from that you make assumptions about what will happen in the future and from there, you make your investment decisions. You have no certainty beforehand, you’re only interpreting data and trying to derive ‘meaning’ from it and then trying to project this meaning in the future to see where you would best invest. Speculation in the financial market is an investment with the hope of gain, but with a risk of loss – wherein your decision-making is based on assumptions/conjectures/guesses. In other words: you’re placing a bet, you’re gambling.

If we bring this back to our personal lives where we interpret what happens in our physical reality by filtering it through our inner experiential reality, we’re actually placing a bet as well. It is a choice, for instance, to believe your perception and interpretation that ‘your partner is an ass’ to be true – you’re betting on it being true. And what are you placing in the balance? The future of your relationship.

You have to remember, we’re slowing things down here – in those moments, it all happens in a blink of an eye. You ask your partner about the toothpaste – he says he forgot – and next thing you’re already saying ‘Gee, you’re such an ass!!’. Everything that we looked at here, happens in that tiny fraction of a moment between hearing he forgot the toothpaste and speaking to him in response. Because it all moves so fast, we often don’t realize how it is in those fractions of moments that we’re actually busy creating/starting an inflation bubble. Yet, it’s in those fractions of moments that the first point of responsibility lies: you interpreted, you chose, you made a bet – and went forward with it.

What do I mean with ‘and went forward with it’. Once you’ve interpreted your partner’s forgetfulness as meaning that ‘he’s an ass’ – then that is how you see him, how you will speak to him, how you will approach him. In other words – you’re actually no longer speaking to your partner as the person standing in front of you, you’re speaking to your own interpretation of who you perceive your partner to be. This is the moment where you’re creating a shift/rift in your reality – from remaining grounded in the physical reality – to entering a ‘bubble’.

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