How Your Beliefs Affect Your Choices
March 31st, 2006 by Erin Pavlina
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In My Reality or Yours and Do Your Beliefs Reflect Reality or Create it?, Steve discusses how belief creates reality. He and I have both learned over the years that your intentions and beliefs have exceptional power to alter your life. Recently I realized how powerful beliefs are in that they affect what choices you make.
I have a close friend who does not believe in life after death. He thinks that when you die that’s it; no light, no heaven, no deceased family waiting for you with open arms, no all-you-can-eat-never-gain-weight celestial buffet. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust. He does not believe his consciousness will continue on. And it shows in the way he lives. He is a major procrastinator (he even procrastinates on throwing out junk mail). He isn’t interested in growing or learning. He’s very intelligent, but he doesn’t use his intellect in any way that matters. All he wants to do is get through the day at his boring and unfulfilling job so that he can go home in the evening and entertain himself with hedonistic pleasures. To use an analogy, his boat is drifting and no one’s at the helm. Since he doesn’t believe in karma or reincarnation, and since he doesn’t believe there will be anything to atone for in the afterlife, he doesn’t go out of his way to help others or be a better person. He basically just eats, sleeps, works, and tries to have fun.
We have discussed the possibility of life after death many times and he’s told me that while he’d like to believe in life after death he can find no evidence of it (though he’s never actually looked for any, being a procrastinator and all). I told him there’s no evidence that life just snuffs out either, yet he seems to have adopted that belief quite easily. He admits I have a point, but his theory is that if he’s not sure he’ll continue on after death, why bother trying too hard in life. Why not just have as much fun as possible, consequences be damned?
I make decisions based on the belief that life is a school; I’m here to learn, to teach, to grow, and eventually to graduate. He makes decisions based on the belief that we are just biological entities enjoying a very brief and pointless existence; to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Now, I’m not saying he is wrong to have these beliefs or to spend his life the way he chooses. I just want to point out that your beliefs affect your choices. What beliefs do you carry and what choices do those beliefs cause you to make? Are you happy with the results?
My life is very fulfilling to me. I enjoy getting up early and seizing the day. I love writing and learning and helping others. I consciously look for ways to improve my life and the lives of others. On the other hand, my friend suffers from nightly insomnia, he lives in a home full of useless clutter (most of it junk mail), he has to drag himself out of bed in the morning and find the motivation to go to work, his work does not please him, he comes home and turns on the tv or the computer and loses himself in fantasy. He has been dating the same woman for nearly 6 years and isn’t sure if he wants to get married but is delaying making the decision because it doesn’t really matter and it will keep for another day. I feel sad for him because nothing excites him more than what happened on Lost last night.
What beliefs do you have and how are they affecting your choices? Do you feel those beliefs serve you? Are your beliefs holding you back from having the life you want? If so, drop them! Get rid of the beliefs that don’t make you happy. Adopt new ones. Whether life after death exists or not doesn’t really matter. What matters is how you feel about the life you’re living now.
The choices you make determine the kind of life you’re going to have. And that can mean the difference between a life of happiness and fulfillment or a life of misery and emptiness.
Check all of your beliefs and see if they are serving you well. Knowing that the choices you make will stem from these beliefs, put them under intense scrutiny and make sure you want them in your life.
And if you see any junk mail lying around, throw it out … fast!
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April 1st, 2006 at 4:06 am
Your friend has a very weird definition of living, that’s not living, that’s dieing. He is waiting for death rather than enjoying his life.
The human being is a social being, the real fun is in being part of the society, in giving. If all he does is take, I doubt he’ll ever feel ALIVE.
April 1st, 2006 at 7:25 pm
I’m not sure your friend’s way of life has anything to do with his perception of life after death.
Some people hold off “living” because they think that they can deal with all that in their afterlife, so sacrifice everything now. They act just like your friend, putting everything off…”oh, never mind, I have the afterlife to get everything done.”
Some people who don’t believe in life after death use this life now to do everything. Live FULL lives. Because they feel they will not have another chance.
And then you get the folks who don’t do good things sincerely - they’re only trying to get brownie points to get to heaven. Or try to minimize their hell points.
It all differs.
April 1st, 2006 at 11:44 pm
It’s not the belief in the afterlife, it is the meaning of life in general, that get people like your friend stuck in such an existential crisis, and the afterlife, for some people, is just one specific ‘required belief’ for life to have meaning. For instance, if your friend requires that in order for life to have meaning there must be an afterlife, and he can’t believe in it either because of lack of objective evidence or personal experience, then he’s going to be stuck not seeing meaning in life. There are only two options for such people who are ’stuck’: One is to live aimlessly pleasing his most basic carnal pleasures to immediately satisfy himslef. And two: commit suicide (which by some philosophers, notably Camus, is the bravest and most truthful thing one can do when faced with this dillema (I disagree with that, but thats another subject)).
Now he can try to ignore this feeling and “just live life”, which so many people do, but this doesn’t work for people who absolutely need this larger outlook of what they are here for.
Or he can do what you say we should do, drop negative beliefs and take on only helpful, positive beliefs. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work for a lot of people either, usually people of a certain level of education/intellect, the more ‘cerebral’ of society if you will, who cannot rationalize ‘blind belief’ no matter how positive its results on the way they will live. This rationalization filter will not allow such memes to enter our subconscious, they get blocked by a sort of ‘mental firewall’ if you will. One way around this is to insert directly into the subconscious via hypnosis; thats the only way I see what you are proposing to work with people like this. If you’ve seen the movie Office Space, this is exactly what happens. Then you’d get into he’s not really living in reality, only his own ‘fake reality’, the whole life within a matrix if it feels good regardless if its ‘true reality’ etc etc… And then this subject degrades into an infinitely recursive discussion of ontological empiricism and the such.
May 15th, 2006 at 9:53 pm
Erin
I am a regular reader of Steve’s blog but I’ve never read anything you write before.
Thanks for taking the time to share your thougths. I just think is fascinating to see how both of you are living your life very congruently.
How do you go about identifying your beliefs and changing them in an way that is lasting.
Cheers…Arnie
May 17th, 2006 at 7:36 pm
Hey! Your description of your pal matches me too! As for how my beliefs are affecting my decision not to “live”, maybe some negative beliefs are:
- I can deal with this later / I have all the time in the world, afterlife or no
- I still can’t figure out what I’ll *really* want to do
- the “fake” reality is fun! Its less “messier” than real life will be, if I don’t like anything I just turn the TV/PC off. If I like something I just watch it / play it again. Real life looks like too much work.
August 1st, 2006 at 1:22 pm
I was reading haig’s comment and nodding here. The thing about changing your beliefs is - or so it has been for me ever since I started reading Steve’s articles and listening to his podcasts - it’s really hard to self impose a new belief. I feel like there are things I would really like to believe, but can’t. I always end up with the feeling that I am trying to fool myself. Our beliefs come from our experiences, our ability to reasonate, the presence or lack of intellectual skills and so on. I find it very hard to think: “I want to believe in this, so from now on I will”. I’m still working on this, I don’t have an answer for that, even if I absolutely agree that your beliefs drastically affect how you live your life - which is, by the way, the reason I have been trying to change some of my beliefs…
October 18th, 2006 at 11:01 am
Your story makes no sense to me. Although many people assure me there is an afterlife and many books say so, there is no intrinsic and objective evidence that I have found. The *modern definition* of atheism (lack of belief), is where I am. What I can’t prove or find any evidence for is irrelevant to me.
Unlike your friend, I live every day knowing that at the end, there is nothing left. It may be today, tomorrow or many years from now. There is no seccond chance so I must learn from my mistakes.
I imagine my existance to be similar to an animal that has little or no comprehension of “after life” but lives each day with hopeful expectation of a meal, a good run, some exploring, a fight or a standoff and maybe even some nooky.
Of course humans have a longer conception of time than our animal friends but essentially we are given only so much time so why waste it?
Your friend on the other hand sounds… messed up. Either you looking for damaged (atheist) goods to support your point or you don’t know many atheists. I know quite a few atheists and we generally seem to have a special appreciation for the one life that we are able to live right now.