A Random Thought #1

Hello World,

Last night, I had a random thought. I thought about my essence, my intrinsic qualities, and how these essence came about.

Using Darwin's theory of natural selection, meaning if I were to assume that these qualities came about because they served some useful role in improving my predecessors' survival, I can derive some interesting implications from it.

But, first, I must able to distinguish my intrinsic qualities from my obtained qualities. To do so, I went back to my earliest memories and searched for some implied qualities from my memories. I would think that we, as our younger selves, were much truer to our own selves, before we were reprogrammed by our external world.

Some of the things that I can more vividly remember are my feelings, such as sadness, joy, embarrassment, gratefulness, and fear.

As a child I was easy to become sentimentally attached to anything. In one specific example, my grandmother once gave me some cash and I remember how special that cash was to me. I remember telling myself to hold on to it and never spend it. It's quite irrational in retrospect, but, at the same time, I could still sympathize with my younger self. I assume it is my thinking that disagrees and my feeling that agrees.

Why do we attach sentimental values to our possessions? These types of phenomena can be observed everywhere. More famously, economists have come up with a name for something similar as this which is called endowment effect. Endowment effect means we tend to put more value to things we possess than not. Classic examples are, hoarding things that we would never buy or biasedly believing that our current way of life, such as culture or tradition, is better kept than not. I think this endowment effect partly arises due to our inability to be more objective and open-minded. Perhaps, association of uncertainties, thus fear, with things that we do not quite understand or have experience in may add to that biased perspective.

However, I think endowment effect is somewhat incongruent to what I mean as sentimental values. I personally think I am more prone to sentimental attachments than to be affected by endowment effect. I, too, hoard things but not because I think they have some great value but because of the time I have spent with them. I don't like to resell my books or textbooks because the time spent with them make them mean much more special.

So, at least to me, I tend to add values to things based on how much time I spend with them and who and what is associated with those things. This means, daily, I am adding values to things that I tend to spend my time with, and the implications aren't so pleasant.

If I were to assume this quality also applies to the other population, we should tend to become more stubborn as we age, and it would require some next generations to really bring about a drastic paradigm shift. Thus, to observe into the future, we perhaps may find some clues from observing how our younger brothers and sisters live their lives.

For one thing, the newer generations are increasingly spending more time online, either by gaming or on the internet. And as these generations come and go, more and more of the population will add greater values to these kinds of activities, and thus build a world that favors and supports these kinds of things (cryptocurrency, virtual reality, decentralization, perhaps?).

It's getting late so I'll finish later.

Bye.