Third-eye drops are intended for open-minded adults, now administering the third-eye drops.

Welcome back to The Mind Meld, my fellow sentient sacks of Stardust.

Wonderful to be with you and the timing on this intro is fortuitous because I just stumbled across

an extremely apropos quote by Aldous Huxley along the lines of,

humans have an almost infinite capacity to take things for granted.

Humans have an almost infinite capacity to take things for granted and you'll see why this is

apropos during the Mind Meld itself. But I was thinking about this, why is it that we so often

tend to take things for granted? And moreover, it actually seems like,

upon reflecting on it, that the mind has a sort of forward-looking negativity bias

that robs us of our gratitude and a hindsight positivity bias. And of course, that too erases our

gratitude for the present moment. Keep in mind this is like completely based off my own

experience and speculation. I have no evidence to back this up whatsoever. But regarding the

backward thinking, I always find myself getting nostalgic about some bygone time.

My mind edits out whatever monotony, whatever mild discomfort, whatever mind numbing routine was

there. You know, the annoying personalities I dealt with at an old job. And I just sort of end up

thinking, ah, simpler times, or something to that effect. I'm not sure why that is.

But then on the forward-looking negativity bias, the state of mind that robs us of our gratitude I

was referring to, I think this is a really pernicious one for a number of reasons. One,

it's anxiety-inducing. You know, that Apollonian organizing analytical part of our mind

looks at the future in all of its innate uncertainty and it tries to grasp for control. It tries

to mitigate any potential problem that could crop up. And it starts to get really toxic

when we do this to such a degree that it starts inventing hypothetical problems.

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