Rationalizing
Join Our Community Subscribe to Paul's PostsOn a recent road trip to California, I snacked so much as to have gained back that which I had worked so hard to lose. Five pounds. I rationalized the snacking as ok because we had agreed, for CoViD safety concerns, to avoid indoor restaurants.
Once safely home, it’s back to The Eat Diet.
I can rationalize just about anything, and I’ll bet I am not alone.
How many of us have rationalized our way down expensive or tiresome rabbit holes seeking yet another tiny improvement?
I have a box filled with green pens and a tape degausser as a reminder.
It takes clarity of purpose, courage, and resolve to quiet the rationalizer in us.
It’s called making excuses. There’s nothing rational about it.
The problem is the diet. I lost about 12kg recently. I didn’t “diet”, I changed what I eat. Snacking is OK if you snack on things that are good for you, at least not bad for you. We get through sacks of dried fruit. I don’t know about “eat diet” because any diet is about eating and if you feel hungry it’s not a very good diet.
For those that have travelled a little, they will appreciate that what people eat usually depends on where you live and what can be produced. It’s the same with audio. There are global brands, but a lot is very regional as are ideas about what works or what is good for you. About 40 years ago the USA went to a preference for high powered amplifiers, in the UK in particular and Europe there has been a preference for nimble little low-powered amps. It’s a matter of taste.
I lost 22kgs ten years ago.
I went from 105kgs down to 83kgs.
I hadn’t been 83kgs since I was in my early twenties; I’m 6’4″
Now I’m 107kgs & I really don’t care about my weight; it’s a pointless exercise as far as I’m concerned.
I know that I can lose the weight if I apply myself, but I’ve got other priorities.
Who put the ‘Rat’ in Rationalizing?
I only bought one ‘Green Pen’ back in 1990 & I did about 325 CD’s with it; it cost me AU$9.95
I don’t know whether it made a great, a small or any improvement to the sound of the music, however for ten bucks I wasn’t going to worry too much about whether it was snake oil or not or whether I would be eating beans on toast for a month.
Ignoring or denying the upgrade itch?
Well…that’s another challenge that we all face.
**OFF TOPIC**
10.5 months in & the US has hit 300,000 dead from CoViD-19.
The real test will be, how many months it will take to get to 600,000;
then we’ll know which direction we are going in.
Green pens 😀
Why was that particular shade of green chosen?
Rationalize all you want for what you want. It all about choices….then living with the result of those choices. When you look back, are you happy with the rationale and the choices made?
Because someone had a lot of green pens that weren’t selling.
Probably something to do with where green sits in the colour spectrum and it’s relationship with laser scatter. Wasn’t that the theory?
That sounds like the line from those days. So if green is the complement of red – then why not black? It absorbs all colors.
Plus at 780nm you’re into the Near IR wavelength range.
(The reason I never bought a pen or colored cd’s)
You can rationalize anything to anybody at anytime. Especially to yourself. 🙂
I love this. Have to remember…
After 2 years of separation, my divorce is now complete and final. Upon reflection, my spouse and I both engaged in too much rationalizing to each other. Admittedly, we were both more into spending than saving. She was a daily shopaholic – especially on-line. Her favorite rationalization – it was “on sale”. For me, I’d research things for months or years. Then when I’d finally pull the trigger to splurge on something for myself – I “deserved it”.
Now that I’m a bachelor again, I find simple pleasures in NOT spending. When the UPS truck stops on my street, I peacefully smile knowing for certain the delivery is for one of my neighbors – not for me! When I see a “SALE” sign in a store front window, I shake my head and keep walking. When I see stereo gear over my budget, I admire it and want to hear it – but I no longer try to figure out how to acquire it.
I cannot take full credit for this current peace of mind. It is partially forced upon me due to less cashflow after the expensive divorce settlement. But it has been revealing and quite satisfying. A silver lining and a simpler, less stressful lifestyle for sure!
Robert you f#@king nailed it !! 🙂
It should be easy for an audiophile to diet.
Just apply the same obsessive approach to eating as you do to audio and it’s job done 😉
Jimmy Buffet may have said it best….
You treat your body like a temple, I treat mine like a tent.
Let’s see, when it comes to amp wattage and woofers, bigger is better, right? How come that doesn’t translate to waist size?
I can rationalize almost any kind of material or edible goods if I want them. The usual rationale is; I’ve been working hard and it’s been a tough year, so I deserve it.
One of these days I’ll wear that pair of blue suede shoes (seriously) I bought earlier this year.
I have a nephew who recently rationalized that he is losing his potbelly by taking pre- and probiotics to cure leaky gut. In the same report he said he was working long and hard days felling trees on a large property. Me thinks the burning of calories as a lumberjack is what is really reducing his belly fat, combined with fewer opportunities for snacking. If we all did strenuous manual labor we could probably eat just about anything we want and get by with it.
I actually remember testing CDs with a tape degausser more than two decades ago, using a powerful unit I borrowed from a video production house. It actually had some positive effect at the start of the CD, but it gradually wore off by the time I reached the last song. A smaller degausser had a commensurately smaller effect.
In other news, snacking while travelling in driverless cars is forecast to cause huge weight gains.
Some Teslas have a glass roof, I’m sure its removable incase they have to crane you out 😉
Lp,
Yeah, I found that I had very little success using the Green Pen on my cassette tapes 🙁