I am a software engineer at JPMorgan Chase as of writing this blog. I joined in 2022. When I joined, we were following a hybrid model of 3 days a week from office and 2 days remote. I decided that I would go to office every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. There was some rationale behind it. The specific rationale is not very important to our discussion here, the important point is, that it was a logical decision with some meaning attached to it. As weeks progressed, going to office every Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday became a norm. I did not give it much thought. It went something like this, “Today is Monday, I am going to office”. That’s it. No reason, this had become a norm. After a point, other people in my office and home started noticing the pattern. They started expecting me to go to office on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. The norm almost became a rule. If someone would see me in office on a Thursday, they would be shocked. If I don’t go on Monday, my mother would ask me, “Are you okay? Visit the doctor if you are ill today”. After a point, the logic behind going Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday was lost (not lost exactly in this case, it was easy to recollect if I tried, but you get the point). It was just a rule. This example, though trivial, reveals a very important aspect of human psychology. Let’s discuss that today.

You see, we tend to trim away all the logic once a decision is made and repeated enough times. We store the final conclusion in the cache memory of our brain; with the logic still present in the hard disk. The logical decision with a rationale behind it becomes a norm and then becomes a rule. The rule is then followed without any thought or reflection. Think of how many rules we follow in our daily lives. Think of waking up and brushing our teeth. Do we think and dig deep into the philosophy of why we should brush our teeth? We are taught that in our school, yes, but do we really think about it or just go about doing the thing? Just think about every small thing you do throughout your day and you will find many such examples. You will also find examples of things we do without knowing the reason at all. Why do we celebrate birthdays by cutting a cake? There might be some logic to it, but I don’t know what that is, and I think that is the case for vast majority of the people.

You might also recognize that this whole “caching the conclusion of a logical argument” thing is extremely important. Why so? Because we have a limit to the number of decisions we can take. If we start thinking deeply about everything, it will lead to a cognitive overload. Think of someone who starts contemplating the origins of the handshake gesture before shaking hands with someone. That would be extremely weird, right? Our brain is hardwired to cache things for faster access. That gives us an evolutionary advantage. Another important advantage of such cached generalized rules is that we can think about more complex problems. Our brain has limited compute capacity. If everyone had to think whether murder is right or wrong every time, society would collapse. A simple rule called “killing an innocent is wrong” saves us. It also enables us to think about more real and complex problems like solving a particular murder case. The loss of meaning was meant to be a feature, not a bug.

When we scale this up to the society level from the individual level, we can observe the same phenomenon. Vaastu Shastra is a good example of this. I don’t really have much knowledge about it, but it likely had a functional logic for the architecture and climate of that time, but it has just become rules now that people follow without knowing the actual reasons. Prayers, another example, although preached to directly reach God (in many traditions) so that he may grant our wishes, have a different purpose. One of the purposes is communal harmony. But vast majority of theists genuinely believe that prayers are meant to directly reach God; and I don’t think that is a bad thing always, unless there is a bad actor involved. There are some really nasty things that can be done due to this caching mechanism on a societal level. Plenty of examples will be coming to your mind, but I want to show the other side as part of this blog similar to how I tried to show how the “us vs them” mindset is much more fundamental to the human nature than we think in my blog The human need for an enemy.

With scientific temperament going mainstream, the importance of meaninglessness seems to be diminishing. A lot of educated people now think that if something doesn’t have a logical explanation, it is not worth believing in. This is especially true for things like religious rituals. Chesterton’s Fence is a great principle which says if a fence exists and we don’t know why it exists, we should not remove it. The principle suggests that if we don’t know the logic to something, it is likely that there is some logic to it that we don’t understand yet. This is another classic tussle between left and right that I had discussed in my blog Balancing the left and the right. The left tells us that illogical things are not worth believing in, while the right tells us that there might be some logic to it that we don’t understand yet. Again, as usual, it is important to find the balance between both.

I think this topic is important for us on an individual level to recognize that it is okay to not have a good reason to do everything. Also, the vast majority of the things we do, are meaningless, and that is how it should be to stay sane. If your mother believes in some superstition which is harmless, let her be, because in some way or the other, we too are superstitious. We should not think that since we are educated and modern, we are not affected by this. This is both important and humbling. Thanks for reading till the end. Hope to see you next time.