A Swiss vendor wrote “can ship from Germany” into his profile. “Amazing!” I thought. He had cheap prices for Pokémon cards, and if he could mail items from Germany, there wouldn’t be the usual hassle with customs, never mind the additional fees. We went back and forth a bit, then I placed an order. A few weeks later, another.
Recently, I went back to this vendor to inquire about the latest set. “Unfortunately, I can’t ship from Germany anymore,” he wrote back. A friend received the same message. The way it read, it sounded almost as if some adversarial event had happened.
I don’t know the true reasons, but at that point, for the first time, it occurred to me this guy may simply have been smuggling Pokémon cards across the border. Plenty of people buy all kinds of items in Switzerland, drive back into Germany, and don’t declare the goods, hoping customs won’t pull them over. Maybe this guy was doing the same. Take his wares, drive to a family member or friend in Germany, and pray at the border crossing.
The mind can be like a bird. Wherever it sees justifications for what it wants to believe, it instinctively pecks at them. “Yum! That tastes good! Why would I consider any other explanation? I like this one!”
When I first discovered my vendor, I automatically assumed he had some official system in place. “Wow, finally someone who’s figured this out!” Maybe he had a special, cross-border business arrangement or stores in both locations. My mind heard what it wanted to hear, then filled in the outline with a few blobs of colors. Nothing too exact, you know? But there was a resemblance of a possible explanation, and that was enough.
Our brains are so used to dreaming up justifications, they can do it while literally dreaming. During last night’s sleep, a friend told me of a mutual college buddy of ours. “You know, he’s actually one of the original five cofounders of Five Guys,” he said. For a split second, dream-me was suspicious: “But that’s an American fast food chain. How could a German guy be a cofounder?” Immediately, my mind came up with an answer: “He must simply be a cofounder of the German branch!” “Oh, sure, that makes sense,” came the answer. There are many Five Guys restaurants in Germany, and that was good enough for my mind. From then on, I was fully focused on my friend’s stories about the guy, from how he was getting married to him moving to Italy afterwards, and how much his net worth was.
After I woke up and had laughed off this strange dream, I realized: I had duped myself! Even while sound asleep, the mind keeps playing tricks on itself. The cofounders of a business don’t change, even once it expands overseas—and our friend isn’t even remotely old enough to have anything to do with Five Guys in its early days.
It’s nice to hear them singing, but don’t get it confused: Your brain is not a bird. Some events can be taken at face value, but most deserve a second look. Invest the time to separate the two. Don’t peck too much at justifications.
