Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Chapter 12: Heartbreak

[Being Wrong]

"It's as if we regard other people as psychological crystals, with everything important refracted to the visible surface, while regarding ourselves as psychological icebergs, with the majority of what matters submerged and invisible" (258). -- Kathryn Schulz

Chapter 12, "Heartbreak" in Kathryn Schulz's book Being Wrong focuses on "why people are so wrong, so often, about love" (249). At the same time though, the chapter is about the deep craving among humans to keep "the terror of isolation in check" (259).

Of the topics that Schulz covered in the chapter, what did you find most useful? Why? Please identify the page number for the concept or idea that you cite. 

12 comments:

Brianna Reed said...

The idea I found most useful from this chapter was the importance of difference in perspective. On pages 255-256 Schulz states " Because we know other people only from the outside,we assume they can be known from the outside; we think we can understand people reasonably well based solely on their words and deeds. At the same time because we know ourselves from the inside, we think we can only be known from the inside".How is it that we feel we can't be understood, but we assume we know all there is to be known about others. We are so ready to judge others from what we see, yet we dislike being judged at face value. It shows just how contradicting our logic is and was just very interesting the way it was explained in the book.

Reed B.

Unknown said...

On page 258, Schulz claims, "It's as if regard other people as psychological crystals, with everything important refracted to the visible surface, while regarding ourselves as psychological icebergs, with the majority of what matters submerged and invisible". I find this to be very true yet very sad. We like to believe that sometimes every one else is normal and that we are the basketcases but in reality everyone has something wrong with them.

Sydney J said...

The idea I found most useful is the concept on page 258-259 about how people do things to keep the terror of isolation in check. This is a weird concept to think about but it's true. People tell me all the time they don't like doing certain things but they only do it so they won't be alone.
Sydney J.

Aja J said...

The topic I found most interesting was extrapolation. On page 253, Schulz introduces the idea of extrapolation as our ability to understand one another. I found this useful because it provided insight on how we think and interact with one another. My favorite quote about this topic has to be when Schulz asked, “If we didn’t possess such similar minds, would we have any hope of understanding one another,”(253).
Aja J

Unknown said...

On page 253, the author poses this question: "if we didn't posses such similar minds, would we have any hope of understanding one another? This is really thought provoking to me because in most cases in order to understand, we have to relate it to the closest thing we know. And we have been doing this since forever.

Unknown said...

On page 253, the author poses this question: "if we didn't posses such similar minds, would we have any hope of understanding one another? This is really thought provoking to me because in most cases in order to understand, we have to relate it to the closest thing we know. And we have been doing this since forever.

Anonymous said...

On page 260 Schulz wrote "the highest form of love was intellectual-the love of one mind for another. That love...brought us back in touch with cosmic truths, those we understood intuitively before our souls took on their imperfect, incarnate forms and we were wrenched out of oneness with the universe...love restores us to a lost wholeness". I found this quote to be useful because this explains why we have this idea of feeling complete when we fall in love And why so many people experince a sense of "incompletness" when they loose a lover. Also this quote is revealing our views of love being beyond just the physical world we live in, that love goes beyond the physical world into a deeper, more spiritual place. I found this quote to be important because this explains why so many of us put so much emphasis on love and holding on to that love.
****Brittany Perry

Anonymous said...

On page 253, the author poses this question: "if we didn't posses such similar minds, would we have any hope of understanding one another? When we are young we need to be able to understand the older and wiser people around this way when we become older we understand, and can teach the younger ones what we have learned.
****Anita Jackson

Anonymous said...

On page 253, the author states the question " if we didn't posses such similar minds, would we have any hope of understanding one another?" This really got me thinking because this is really true especially when it comes to finding a person to be in a relationship with. We tend to seek out and attract people of the same interest as us. To answer the question I don't think that we would be good at understanding each other if we didn't have similar minds because we could relate anything to a person and therefor not understand them.
Sierra L.

Taylor Morgan said...

I agree with what Shultz says when she refers to why we (humans in general) don't want to make mistakes, mess up or "be wrong." In the book she says, "Seen in this light [referring to the statement that our error and existential angst spring from a common source] , it's no wonder we despise being wrong. It reminds us, however obliquely, of this rift between us and the world: of the limits - all the limits - of being human" from page 259.
Perfection is such a sought after goal, especially in American society. Along with not living up to unrealistic standards we set for ourselves, we also feel that we need to be hyper-aware of how well we compare to our peers. Unfortunately, these points along with others are some of the reasons why mistakes or wrongs we commit impact our lives so harshly.

Terri McFadden said...

On page 256 Schulz talks about how we know people from the outside by their actions and words but ourselves from the inside like thinking more about why we decided to do what we did. This is very true and it is extremely interesting to me because we do it without trying to. Even when reading this and noticing this it is still impossible for us to get passed because we will never truly know if we know someone on the inside.

Tashawna N. said...

The idea that I thought was most useful is the that people do things so that they do not have to be alone. I found this useful because I know that this is true because I do this sometimes because the idea of being alone scares me.
~Tashawna Nash