Dan Ariely
speaker
111 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Dan Ariely’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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The recipe for a good life has to involve lots of progress, and lots of progress means lots of scars.
Many years ago, I was burned in a bad accident. 70% of my body was burned. I was in hospital for about three years. I get a simple email from somebody, and she sent me a list of links. I'll just describe to you one video. It says I was burned, 70% of my body, all of this correct. And then the video goes on to say that this is why I started hating healthy people.
And that's why I joined Bill Gates, the cabal, the Illuminati, to try and kill as many healthy people as possible. I started getting death threats. It became very tough.
What happens is that people start with...
Half a beard is a good way to think about my life, my history, and also on behavioral economics. So here's the story. I have half a beard. If you're on audio, believe me, I have a beard. My right cheek doesn't have hair. My left cheek does. And there's also some whites there. And this half a beard has a few reasons. The first one is that I was badly burned.
Many years ago, I was burned in a bad accident. 70% of my body was burned. I was in hospital for about three years. Terrible tragedy, very difficult. Got me to think about lots of things in life. But as a consequence, I don't have hair on the right side of my face. It's all scar tissue, so hair doesn't grow on this side. But of course, I could shave.
And if I shaved, I would have no hair on both sides. And for many years, indeed, I shaved. And a few years ago, I went on a month-long hike. And at the end of this month-long hike, I came out with half a beard. And it was the first time I looked at myself in the mirror. and I didn't like how I looked. It's a very strange look. It's strange to look at. It's strange for me to look at.
And I thought to myself that I'll certainly shave this half a beard, but I'll keep it for a few more weeks just as a memory of the hike. So I kept it for a few weeks, and then I posted a few comments on social networks and so on. And to my surprise, a few people reached out to me thanking me for the half a beard. Now, why were they thanking me for the half a beard?
These were people who were struggling with their own injuries. They were feeling that they were hiding their own injuries and that now that might be give them some energy to try something different. So, for example, there was a woman in her 50s who told me that when she was 17, she had a car accident. Her leg was injured and she never wore a dress or a skirt since. And she's going to try.
So that gave me power to say, OK, I'll continue with this half a beard. But then the other thing that happened was about four months down the line, I felt more comfortable with my scars. Now, I got injured when I was about 18. It was many years ago. And all of a sudden now, four months into this half a beard, I feel better about my scars. I don't feel that they are me and my injury.
I feel that I'm together. It's part of the story of my life. And I think to myself, what's happening? Why now? And here is what happened. Imagine somebody like me wakes up. When I wake up, my right cheek is smooth, no hair. The left cheek has stubble, little black dots. And the act of shaving is also an act of hiding, exactly the thing that people told me that they wanted to stop doing.
I start the day more non-symmetrical, and after shaving, it's less apparent. Now, here's the thing about this. I'm a social scientist. I should know those things. But, of course, I didn't. In fact, for many years, I did the thing that wasn't good for me. I shaved. And letting go of that was an incredible act of self-acceptance.
And I think that what happened there was that I basically stopped hiding, started accepting myself to a higher degree, and it had lots of implications. in all kinds of ways. And if I think about what it means in social science terms, where are our half-beards?
And if you asked me a few years ago, how would life look like with half a beard, I would be very able to tell you how day one would look like. People would ask questions, kids would laugh, people would point. But if you ask me, how would that lead to self-acceptance or to anything down the road, I would not be good at it. And it's true for lots of things.
And some of the things we'll talk about today with our intuitions are about short-term activities and our long-term intuitions about processes are not that good. So somebody thinks about switching jobs. We might have good intuitions about day one. We might not have intuition about month four and so on. So anyway, that's my half a beard and my introduction.
There's an expression in the pain research when they call people pain people. And the idea that at a certain level of pain, the pain becomes so much that there's really nothing beyond the pain. And in the initial period of the injury, there really wasn't more. I can't take credit for anything. I wasn't planning. I wasn't thinking. I was just focusing on a daily pain, trying to get over it.
I think managing quite well with the daily pain, trying to come up with my own strategies to dealing with pain and so on. But the beginning was just pain. And in some strange way, maybe year two, when I was trying to be a bit better, was psychologically more difficult. This is when I all of a sudden had time. And I asked myself questions like, where would I find my place in society?
Where will I find my place professionally? Will society accept me? Will I have a romantic life with all of these cars? When will the pain go away? And then there was another interesting period, interesting in a difficult sense. Burns are really interesting because all of us had burns and mostly they go away. But if you look at my hand, for example, these are burns that don't go away.
This is all transplanted skin. The fingers are deformed. The joints were burned. This doesn't go away. And I had lots of questions about where will this leave me and how will I manage my life? What do you do with that? And in the beginning was not easy. I remember actually the people in the hospital brought somebody to talk to me. that had a bad injury and then became a car mechanic.
So even though his fingers were not so good, he actually managed to be a car mechanic. And I think it was a tremendous feat for him to be a car mechanic. But I looked at it and said, that's what they expect me to be. What will happen to me? What skills will I have and not have and so on? So there was a lot of wondering about what would life be with somebody with very substantial injuries.
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