Your Subconscious Mind is Ridiculously Powerful

Paulo, one of the main hosts of the World Cup, was anything but festive. Entire parts of the city remained shut, as cars were stuck on stretches of tarmac as far as the eye could see. The effects soon extended well beyond the city, as the entire country of Brazil felt the effects of what would become the worst traffic jam in history. Eventually, the jam was said to have been over 214 kilometers long. Disputes about the economic implications of hosting a World Cup, worker deaths, and countrywide protests were ultimately what led to it.

But São Paulo is notorious for being one of the most congested places on the entire planet. Now, you and I may not have been in such a historic traffic jam, but we’ve definitely had our experiences of being stuck in traffic, when the cars barely seem to move, the lights barely seem to change, and before you know it, a little 5-minute drive ended up taking you over 2 hours.

Aside from driving us completely out of our minds, these traffic jams have obvious implications—economic and otherwise. Just in 2018 alone, traffic congestion is said to have cost the U.S. economy around $87 billion. In addition, congestion increases fuel consumption and, by extension, emissions. In reality, this just hurts us more than it helps; it wastes precious time that we could have spent just being where we wanted to be. Instances of road rage rise, which then contributes to more driver error, which means more accidents, which means more traffic. It sucks. Traffic is much more demanding on our body and mind, and deteriorates the quality of life for everyone involved. You either go to the office to angry bosses or home to a cold dinner, which really begs the question: how far off are we to solving this terrible, terrible thing?

Well, let’s get to that. What makes traffic jams and congestion so interesting is that beyond the more quantifiable metrics, such as the flow of cars, the volume of traffic, and number of lanes, there’s this other spontaneous factor to this phenomenon that’s much harder to predict or measure: the human factor. Each vehicle is, after all, being maneuvered or piloted by a human driver, at least for now anyway. And as such, the intricacies of traffic are, in a way, just expressions of the intricacies of human behavior. It all defaults back to us—the driver.

It’s no wonder then that Tom Vanderbilt, a guy who literally wrote an entire book talking about traffic, calls New York City traffic a giant applied psych lab. Let’s see why he would say that. He refers to an experiment conducted in England by a traffic psychologist named Ian Walker, where bicycles were rigged with sensors that would calculate the distance and speed of vehicles driving past. The experimental conditions were as such: in the first scenario, the rider was wearing a helmet, in the second he wasn’t, and in the third, he tried to appear female by wearing a wig and a dress.

It was found that when the rider appeared to be wearing a helmet, the cars felt more comfortable driving close by. When he wasn’t wearing a helmet, they gave him a bit more space, and when the rider seemed to be a woman, they gave him even more space. These are judgments which Tom likes to call beneath the subconscious that the drivers were making about the competence of the rider and the likelihood of an accident, with very little and often inaccurate evidence.

Ask yourself: are riders wearing helmets always more experienced? Does wearing a helmet make you safer? Physically yes, but mentally, it could cause you to act differently and take risky maneuvers that you otherwise might not have. There are other experiments like this, of course. You might think that the more regulated a traffic situation is, the safer it is; the more often you see signals and signs at intersections, the more careful drivers will be. But that's not the case. As it turns out, if there are too many signals, drivers often find themselves in a false sense of security.

The seemingly abundance of caution that the traffic lights can portray causes drivers to drop their guard in the most risky parts of the road, which often leads to more accidents. This seemingly unintuitive idea was actually discovered due to an electrical failure in a traffic light. The observation and the later theory that emerged from it is credited to Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman. He developed the idea of shared space when driving—essentially, instead of adding more signs, street markings, crosswalks, and so on, you instead actually remove these things—the very things you think are actually making you safe.

There are no curbs separating the street from the sidewalk; there aren’t sidewalks to begin with. It’s just all together—cars and pedestrians. With this, drivers find themselves less confident than they were before because, well, there’s no separation. There’s nothing splitting those driving cars from those who are just on bikes or even walking. It makes drivers more cautious, which in turn actually saves more lives by preventing accidents and traffic, as opposed to increasing it.

Of course, there are more intuitive instances of traffic behavior, namely things like rubbernecking. It’s when an accident in one lane of traffic causes drivers in other lanes or even other roads to slow down while they’re passing by to watch things as they unfold. Because we’re nosy and like to get into other people’s business. But beyond the physical obstruction that the accident causes, this is an added slowdown often caused purely by psychological reasons. If just a few cars slow down, the other cars behind them are forced to slow down; the triple effect leads to more widespread congestion. Before you know it, you’re in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

That's exactly why in some countries, accident sites are quickly covered with portable boundaries to prevent people from catching an unnecessary glance. But here again, the human factor creeps in. Tom suggests that there might be more to this mundane activity—he thinks that drivers sometimes pause not to just see what’s going on, but also to reflect briefly on their own morality—the possibility of something like this happening to them as well. Everyone thinks they’re a good driver until they aren’t.

Another curious aspect of traffic is the nonlinearity between the amount of traffic and the congestion that it leads to. What I mean is if only 1% of all drivers were to use public transportation, that could lead to a reduction in traffic by more than 20%. Although not a bottleneck in the traditional sense, the convention of 9 to 5 office hours might have a lot to do with congestion as well. In normal circumstances and daily routine, traffic tends to perform at similar times because everyone is on similar schedules.

Everyone heading to work at roughly the same time has been notoriously bad for economies. With the recent pandemic and the wave of companies trying to get their work done online, you have to wonder what the long-term implications of this newfound flexibility will be on traffic. While most offices will still be operated from physical spaces, even a slight reduction in the daily number of commuters could have a drastic effect on congestion and improve economies while doing so.

And while the long-term changes might be positive for the most part, it doesn't mean everything is perfect. Some studies have emerged stating that while there were indeed fewer accidents by volume, a higher percentage of them were fatal. Drivers were again guilty of feeling safer and were thereby less alert on emptier roads, which led to more speeding. The psychological implications of feeling safe on the road can cause a chain reaction of decisions that ultimately make you less safe.

Which is another remarkable stat that doesn’t make sense at first glance. Sometimes the bottlenecks are even more obvious; for example, roads that are not wide enough to accommodate necessary volumes, unplanned infrastructure, or as in the case of São Paulo, a massive countrywide protest. These are some of the biggest causes of congestion on our roads today.

If we were somehow able to control these issues, however, would that mean the eradication of traffic forever? Well, if only things were that simple. In one of the more remarkable experiments by some Japanese physicists, you can see cars traveling in a circle, completely devoid of any of the traditional bottlenecks. All they have to do is turn left—that's literally it.

They are driving in a closed circular track—no intersections, no distractions. They’re also asked to maintain a steady speed and a steady distance—traditional traffic advice—so it’s not like the experiment is rigged to cause the drivers to make a mistake. In fact, they're just asking them to drive normally. And sure enough, they start just fine. But after the experiment runs for a brief period, as time passes on, the human factor steps in.

Some of the drivers have difficulty maintaining a steady speed or distance; they’re either too close to the vehicle in front or the one behind. To correct this, they have to brake or accelerate. As with most human drivers, they end up overcompensating. After all, better safe than sorry, right? Now this causes the driver behind this car to stop as well, and the results of all these reactions are further compounded by the reaction times of each of the other drivers. A sudden braking in front of a driver causes him to brake, and that causes the driver behind him to brake as well. Erratic braking emerges out of nowhere, and with it emerges a congested flow of traffic. Before you know it, you’re stuck in traffic where there shouldn’t be traffic.

That came out of nowhere. This is what is called a phantom traffic jam. Out of nothing physical whatsoever, a traffic jam self-generates using only our reaction times, and often it dissipates as organically as it emerges. Besides, you have to consider the fact that if even the most controlled simulations can lead to such a traffic jam, then the chaos of the real world only adds fuel to the fire. Real roads are not single lane closed-off circular tracks. They are mazes of tarmac driven on by drivers that are using their phones, drivers that are in a hurry, drivers that are barely rested, drivers that probably shouldn’t be driving.

Theoretically, the ripple effect of traffic jams could still be absorbed by maintaining a long enough gap between vehicles. The more space you have between you and the car ahead of you, the more time you and the cars behind you have to react in time to brake smoothly and still keep going.

It can be difficult to accept that the phantom traffic jam seemingly arises out of nothing, especially given the overall impact of traffic jams on the economy, our well-being, and the rest of the world. Which brings us to traffic forecasting. If you aren’t able to prevent traffic, maybe being aware of when it may occur is the next best thing. Right now, most of us use Google Maps to estimate traffic in a particular region. If you’ve ever used your phone as a GPS, you’ll see areas that show up red as congested areas begin to form.

Google uses Android phones to crowdsource data about numerous things, like the number of vehicles in a region and how fast they're moving. And if you’ve ever used an Android phone yourself, you’ve contributed to the pool of data too. But it’s still not necessarily forecasting a jam; it’s merely telling you if one has already been formed, which is certainly useful but not a solution.

Newer methods of forecasting are being developed using machine learning and AI. Cameras mounted on signals and busy intersections are feeding data to a control center that is then regulating traffic signals across a given region. This is allowing for two things: one, to be able to predict traffic with as much as 90% accuracy, and two, to be able to react to emerging congestions by temporarily closing off certain roads and opening others. It’s being tested in one of the most congested regions in the world, India, but the tests are still on a smaller scale.

These systems are yet to see large-scale implementation, but there is a possibility that these forecasting systems will become obsolete before they're even rolled out. That’s because of the emergence of self-driving cars. Think about it: what is at the core of some of the most unavoidable traffic jams? The human factor. It is the inability of human drivers to maintain a steady speed and distance, and self-driving cars can take the element right out of the equation.

Aside from being able to better prevent fatal accidents, I think another major aspect of how self-driving cars will change our roads for the better is by preventing congestion. If cars can communicate amongst themselves, lanes could be merged automatically. Blind spots would no longer be a thing if you have 360° cameras on the car. We could even get rid of signals and traffic lights since the cars would just communicate amongst themselves about when to stop and when to go. That would reduce a lot of the clutter in our cityscapes.

But what about the cars that are still driven by us humans? The thing is, the transition to 100% self-driving cars could be an extremely difficult one if we’re not careful. We still have to factor in that in the near future, the roads will not be the automated utopia that we’re dreaming of. Rather, they’ll be a bit of both—human-driven cars and self-driven cars, each adapting to one another. If we're so busy building our infrastructure with driverless cars, we could forget about the very people that are supposed to be benefiting from it.

After all, a self-driving car’s job will not only be to drive itself and communicate with other self-driving cars, but to also adapt to the unpredictability of a human driver—however many of them are still remaining. Transportation has always been tied to civilization. Our ability to cooperate in large numbers—which is what led to the rise and sustenance of our civilization—has a lot to do with the ability to cover large distances sustainably.

A large portion of that distance has been covered on roads. In fact, getting from A to B has a remarkable effect on our perception of the world and the decisions we take. Aside from the obvious economic implications traffic has, it also makes the world seem like a larger place than it needs to be. People spend a disproportionate amount of valuable time out on the roads—time that you’ll never, never get back. They also don’t meet each other as often, and a lot of the world’s wonders that surround us remain untouched, unexplored. Making sure that we explore them involves understanding traffic jams and, by extension, the minds of the humans that caused them.

Why do we dream? This is one of life’s great unanswered questions. Given that we spend around six years of our lives in a dream state, it’s no wonder people want to understand why we do it. Sure, there are theories, and I’ll get to them, but there’s no clear consensus on why we do it. No one really knows for sure. Or do they? Dreams are strange to say the least, and for many of us, they hold great significance—so much that we like to share them with others at length, if we can even remember them, and try to interpret their secret and hidden meanings.

So, do they actually hold any real meaning? Well, I have some ideas. Before we get to some of the bigger questions, let’s just look at what goes on inside the brain as our nighttime adventures take their course. While sleeping, we go through different cycles of the five stages of sleep. These are divided into REM sleep and non-REM sleep.

REM simply means rapid eye movement. It explains itself, right? The first four stages are non-REM sleep. These are restorative and, for the most part, dreamless. As we move through these initial stages, our brain activity slows, but about 90 minutes after we finally fall asleep, we hit stage five—REM sleep. This is when the dreaming really gets going. When we’re in this stage, the body is, for all intents and purposes, paralyzed. Your heart rate goes up, your blood pressure rises, and brain activity returns to near waking levels.

The paralysis in REM sleep is caused by the release of glycine, an amino acid from the brain stem onto your brain’s motor neurons. It’s suggested that this paralysis is nature’s way of preventing us from acting on our dreams—and that's probably for the best. The limbic system is a pretty primitive part of the brain that deals with emotions and is very active during REM sleep. It’s made up of the amygdala, which is mostly associated with fear; the hippocampus, which is heavily involved in the formation of long-term memory; and the cingulate gyrus, which is involved in our physical reactions to situations.

Break down the roles of these bizarre brain structures, and we can start to paint a picture of why our dreams often take the bizarre and scary forms they do. Couple this with the fact that the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that deals with logic and self-control, isn’t really active during REM sleep, and things might just start to make sense. But understanding it isn’t enough to prevent these nightmares from happening.

It can also happen while you’re awake. Sleep paralysis is a terrifying concept. Like I just mentioned, when you fall asleep, your brain doesn’t completely shut off. In order to prevent you from acting out your dreams while you sleep, the brain releases chemicals that leave you paralyzed. This paralysis is supposed to be lifted as soon as you wake up, but sometimes it doesn’t, and that’s where you get sleep paralysis. You wake up—you’re awake, aware of your consciousness—but you can’t move.

It feels as if there’s a massive weight on your body, preventing you from actually waking up. Sleep paralysis is often most caused by disrupted REM sleep, so some people may believe they’re still dreaming when they’re in fact awake because of this. Some of your nightmares could leak into the real world. While undergoing sleep paralysis, you’ll often see things standing in the corners of your room or on the ceiling or even closer. Luckily this usually goes away pretty quickly.

So is it just biology? Is that really the answer? Is there no secret window into our psyche? Everyone at one time or another has wondered what their dreams mean. Some believe that dreams have no meaning and serve no function; others believe that they’re one of the most important things that human biology has allowed to happen. There are, in fact, many theories of why we dream and what purpose it serves. I can’t really go any further without mentioning Freud. His theories of dreams are probably the most well-known around the world.

It focuses on the content of the dreams themselves as an explanation of the function of dreaming. German psychiatrist Sigmund Freud theorized that dreams represented a window into the unconscious mind—a reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that are beyond our conscious awareness. The bulk of the iceberg is submerged deep underwater. Most of the contents of the unconscious mind are supposedly unacceptable or unpleasant, representing feelings of pain, anxiety, or conflict.

When we’re sleeping, the forces that keep these feelings in check are weakened, allowing us to live out our desires and even fears through our dreams. Freud strongly believed that by exploring dreams, people could increase self-awareness and gain insight into their unconscious self that would then help them deal with problems in their day-to-day lives. He also argued that the true meaning of our dreams is hidden within their actual content and that interpretation is needed to understand how they relate to our unconscious fears or desires.

Many of you watching might even agree with this, despite the fact that there’s absolutely zero evidence to back this account. It is pretty much unfalsifiable, even though more modern explanations now exist that are better informed due to a deep understanding of how the brain works. 20th-century Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung also believed that dreams allow us to tap into the unconscious, but argued that it was a collective unconscious that we were able to access through our dreams.

According to Jung, this is a theoretical repository of information shared by everyone, in which certain symbols in dreams have meanings that are similar for all people, regardless of culture or location. This could explain why so many of us share variations on common themes in our dreams, like falling, being chased, or our teeth falling out. Any of these sound familiar?

Dream interpretation is the process of assigning meaning to dreams. Even today, the practice plays an important role in various forms of psychotherapy, which is surprising given that there is only a little evidence so far that shows understanding or interpreting dreams has a positive impact on mental health. This could be because evidence also shows that people tend not to attribute equal importance to all dreams. Motivated reasoning comes into play: people are more likely to view dreams that confirm their waking beliefs and desires as meaningful compared to dreams that contradict them.

But just for fun, let’s take a look at some interpretations of the most common dream themes. We’ve all had the falling dream, right? Well, this could be a warning from your subconscious and is common in people who are having a major life problem with work or relationships. It could be an indication of insecurities, instability, or worries. You might be feeling overwhelmed and out of control in some situations in your waking life.

This type of dream could also reflect a sense of failure or inferiority in some circumstance or situation. It’s typically suggested that showing up to work or school naked represents vulnerability and anxiety. Clearly, research has demonstrated that this dream is common in people who have accepted a promotion, gone off to a new job, or who are coming into public view.

Others argue that it means you may be hiding something and are afraid that others can see right through you. And despite the nightmarish feel of dreaming that someone or something is chasing you, they can be considered a positive message—a little prompt from the unconscious to encourage the dreamer to face a problem they’ve been avoiding. It’s suggested that who or what is chasing you and how far away they are is important.

These common themes barely touch the surface of the complexity and endless variety and variations of dreams. We know dream interpretation can be entertaining, but there are definitely more contemporary theories about the purpose of dreaming that are probably important to consider, too. A better understanding of brain function and activity has allowed for the development of neurobiological theories in more recent years, one of which is the activation synthesis theory.

Not quite as intriguing as the psychoanalytic approach—in fact, it’s pretty boring. This theory simply rejects the idea that dreams mean anything at all, which is disappointing. They could be merely electrical brain impulses that pull random thoughts and imagery from our memories. Activation synthesis suggests that humans can create dream stories after they wake up in a natural attempt to make sense of the absurd.

I kind of get it. There are some holes in this theory too though—the main one being that there is vast documentation of the realistic aspects of human dreaming and evidence that dreams do reflect real-life events that are important or prominent for the dreamer. For example, a study in 2006 asked women who were going through a divorce to report the degree to which their former spouses were on their minds over a 5-month period.

These same women were awakened during REM sleep on three nights and asked to provide a detailed account of their dream content. A positive correlation was found between the degree to which women thought about their former spouses during waking hours and the number of times their former spouses appeared as dream characters. In another study, researchers demonstrated that dreaming can help solve complex mental tasks. Participants were much better—10 times better, in fact—at getting through a complex 3D maze if they had napped and dreamed of the maze before their second attempt.

This strongly suggests that certain memory processes happen exclusively during sleep and that our dreams are not only a signal that these processes are taking place but seem to be crucial to better performance. So unconstrained by reality and the rules of conventional logic, the dreams your mind can create have the potential to lay out limitless scenarios to work through problems and produce solutions that you may not have even considered while awake.

So it turns out that dreams can be influenced by pre-sleep emotions and can be really helpful for problem solving. So that’s another theory put to bed. The continual activation theory proposes that the conscious and unconscious mind must remain continually active in order to maintain proper brain function. In this context, dreams function to consolidate working memories into long-term memories, and dreaming is simply an incidental result of the brain’s need for continual activation.

This means that if the brain’s activity falls below a certain level, such as during sleep, it is stimulated to maintain activity through dreams. The expectation fulfillment theory explains dreaming as a way to release emotional arousals that haven’t been expressed during the day. This frees up space in the brain to deal with the emotional arousals of the next day and allows instinctive urges to stay intact. In effect, the action we wanted to take is completed in a metaphorical form, and this prevents a false memory from being created because we perceive the action as a dream instead.

So dreams are metaphors for unfulfilled arousals and expectations. But because sleep does not involve the same stimulation of waking life, dreams draw on memory instead of motor or sensory activity. It is this process that apparently generates the unusual imagery, narratives, and thought patterns we experience in dreams. This explanation has received validation anecdotally through people’s personal experiences, but same old story: it is essentially unfalsifiable.

Interpretation of dream events is subjective, so we aren’t able to put this theory through rigorous scientific testing. I could go on with the theories for days, but you get the point: no one really knows. It’s very, very difficult to disprove most theories. Maybe some of the more fascinating dream phenomena can shed light on the function of dreaming. The term lucid dreaming was coined by Van Eden way back in 1913, although people were writing about this kind of experience as far back as the 1800s.

It describes a state in which the dreamer is aware they are asleep and sometimes has the ability to control events and actions. It most commonly occurs during late-stage REM sleep and essentially allows your conscious mind to control something your unconscious mind normally controls. Lucid dreamers report being able to fly, taste, smell, and touch pretty much anything they want. It’s more common than you think, with about 55% of people having experienced the state at one time or another.

For starters, participants were asked to perform specific ocular movements if they became lucid while dreaming. By ocular movements, I mean moving your eyes; that’s literally it. This is possible actually, and it’s kind of ingenious because eye muscles are free to move during REM sleep. By determining exactly when the sleeper was lucid and dreaming, researchers were able to take recordings of brain activity during the state.

The evidence showed some interesting and specific brain activity that represents a mixture of both waking and normal REM sleep. It also seems that the brain undergoes a specific altered state of physiology during lucid dreaming that constitutes a hybrid state of consciousness. Studies have shown that the prefrontal cortex, as well as the frontal, parietal, and temporal zones, become activated. These areas of the brain are responsible for higher order cognitive functioning, including working memory, cognitive flexibility, planning, inhibition, abstract reasoning—the list goes on.

So besides being quite entertaining, why do it? Can we learn anything from it? Some advocate many potential benefits, including boosting creativity and confidence, reducing stress, and as a possible therapeutic technique to treat nightmares, PTSD, and other mental health disorders. Others view the practice as more spiritual and approach it the way they would in meditation, with the intention of increasing the person’s sense of the vastness of reality, opening up new realms of discovery.

It’s even been suggested that some advanced meditation practitioners are able to become conscious of what is beyond the dream state—the deep formlessness of delta sleep. This is questionable at best and in need of much further study. Given our current relatively limited understanding of the brain, it’s hard right now to understand how it could be possible to be conscious of deep sleep, because the brain is in a far more synchronized and deeply unconscious state compared to almost any other state of consciousness.

But hey, who knows? Despite the evidence, lucid dreaming remains a controversial topic. Alternative explanations have been suggested for the phenomenon. It may be that lucid dreamers are in a daydream-like state of semi-wakefulness, or are they dreaming normally but have a memory of the dream and believe that they were conscious and directing the dream, but were not? It could be a sleep state dissociation in which the person is both awake and asleep in the dream state at the same time. I suppose it’s even possible that people aren’t reporting true experiences, but I personally don’t think this is what’s going on.

If lucid dreaming is as real as the evidence suggests, I’m left wondering if dreaming serves any of the purposes I’ve already talked about, such as accessing the unconscious, acting out instinctive urges, solving problems, or whether they’re simply electrical impulses keeping the brain from shutting down. How does being a conscious witness affect how they play out? Does it hinder or help? Is it a state of heightened reflective consciousness that humans are meant to access so that we can enlighten ourselves about our life, our world, and our purpose? Or does lucid dreaming stand alone in its function to serve an entirely different purpose?

Have you ever dreamt of an event only to find out that it happens in your waking life? It’s a weird occurrence. Precognitive dreams are dreams that appear to predict the future through a sixth sense, and there are some pretty famous examples of this happening. When the Titanic sank in 1912, hundreds of people came forward with reports of psychic dreams about it sinking.

It was even possible to validate at least 19 of them, including a date-stamped letter. Several people apparently canceled tickets and decided to not travel based on their dreams. Are all 19 of these people psychic? Well, no. In fact, in this case, it’s likely to be simple math and the power of probability. Think about it: there’s 7.2 billion people on this planet, each having an average of five dreams per night. Whether you remember them or not, in turn, those dreams support multiple common dream themes, including events like sinking ships and airplane crashes.

When all of this is considered in reality, it’s highly likely that many thousands of people will dream about a sinking ship on any given night—probably tonight too. Now, adding a bit of unconscious insight and media suggestion for good measure, the Titanic was the world’s largest ship on its maiden voyage and was in the headlines before it even undocked. The media had called it unsinkable. The power of suggestion is immense, and it’s no surprise that all this news attention and maybe even some nerves about taking such a huge trip infiltrated more than just a few dreams.

So the next time you dream about an event that has nothing to do with you and it comes true, it's probably just a coincidence. Probably. But what about dreaming of your own death? This is a deeply personal experience and probably not subject to extensive media attention. It’s exactly what happened to Abraham Lincoln. Two weeks before he was shot dead in 1865, Abraham Lincoln had a dream about a funeral at the White House. When he asked someone who was in the casket, they replied, "the president."

He was killed by an assassin. Clearly, he didn’t listen because at the time he was assassinated, he had given his bodyguard the night off. If the premonition dream is about something close and personal to you, some might argue that your subconscious mind is accessing a piece of information that you weren’t consciously aware of in your waking state. You just missed it.

The brain has so much to process every second you’re alive; it only makes sense that some information is lost. So it’s less psychic power and more inner feelings or intuition that you’re experiencing through your dream. And this takes us deeply full circle back to the question of why we dream. If you don’t believe in psychic abilities that manifest in dreams, then precognitive dreams are essentially the window into our unconscious.

Of course, as always, some disagree with these explanations of precognitive dreams and suggest that when matches occur on such a reliable and frequent basis, this can’t be entirely down to coincidence. Some of these people turn to a mix of philosophy and physics to understand how precognitive dreams might happen. To truly understand these theories, it is necessary to assume that the future consists of many possibilities and which one becomes reality is determined by the choices we make.

The butterfly effect shows up yet again. Ultimately, common sense would tell us that dreams likely serve many purposes as opposed to just a single one, and how we choose to understand our dreams and why they happen is largely a product of time and culture. The function of dreams may have even changed as humans have—and continue to change—across time itself.

What once acted as a rehearsal system for evading predators is now serving to help us navigate the social and technological complexities of modern life and its stresses. Dreaming is vital. The link between dreaming and REM sleep is undeniable, as are the benefits of REM sleep for our health and well-being. So don't stifle them; they’re only trying to help you. Sweet dreams.

In 2012, Drake made a song titled "The Motto," but what most people remember from it is YOLO. YOLO tells you to live in the moment, enjoy life you have today, and not worry too much about tomorrow because at the end of the day, you only live once. While Drake certainly popularized the motto, he wasn’t the first to use the phrase, and he certainly wasn’t the first to come up with the idea of enjoying the pleasures of today without worrying about tomorrow. This idea has been around since the 4th century BC, as what philosophers call hedonism—a school of thought that was created by Aristippus of Cyrene, a student of Socrates.

Hedonism is the idea that the end goal of all of our actions in life is, one, to pursue pleasure and, two, to avoid pain. Aristippus believed that the only good cause worth pursuing was one that would ultimately bring you pleasure. In today's society, we’re taught that the way to succeed is to suffer today so you can enjoy tomorrow—to save for a rainy day. Once we get out of college, we’re encouraged to find a job and work hard at a 9 to 5 for many years—live modestly and save as much as possible—so we can enjoy our retirement 50 years later.

Aristippus didn’t believe in any of that. He didn’t believe in the idea of delayed gratification, and he always advocated for people to simply get pleasure from what is present and available. He was completely against the idea of suffering in the present in order to get something that only might be pleasurable in the future. So instead of telling students in college to study hard for their exams so they can land a good job after school, for example, Aristippus would encourage them to fraternize, drink, and party lavishly because these are the pleasures that are readily available to them.

On the one hand, you can see him as stupid and lacking foresight. After all, if you squander everything you have on the pleasures of today, you'll quickly run out of resources, and all of that pleasure will turn to pain. From people losing everything they had because of an addiction to people living in poverty as a result of their own laziness, we’ve seen the results of solely focusing on the present pleasures. But on the other hand, there’s some wisdom to the school of thought because truly, tomorrow isn’t promised to any one of us.

What’s the point in working hard at a 9 to 5 for 50 years, ignoring all of the pleasures of the time, only to die a few years before retirement? And let’s say you do make it to retirement. The sad reality is that one in four people will have a disability by the age of 60, and the older you get, the chances of that happening increase drastically. Knowing all of this, is it still foolish to think that we are all better off just enjoying the pleasures that we do have in the present?

Socrates and other philosophers at the time certainly believed so. A lot of philosophers hated the idea of hedonism because saying that the end goal of the entire human existence is simply to pursue pleasure and avoid pain just sounded vain. This opposition, combined with the rise of Christianity in ancient Greece at the time, meant that this extremely rash idea of hedonism died with Aristippus many years later.

Epicurus, who was considered the father of modern-day hedonism, redefined what hedonism was. To do that, he had to start by redefining a certain word: pleasure. For Aristippus, pleasure was a state of ecstasy and excitement—the amazing feeling you have after biting into your favorite food or after that first sip of coffee in the morning. And for most of us, this is how we define pleasure. But not Epicurus. For Epicurus, pleasure was a state of tranquility.

Instead of encouraging people to indulge themselves in constant gratification, Epicurus believed that the true meaning of pleasure was to kill the fear of both death and God, because only then would you truly be able to fully enjoy what this life has to offer. While Aristippus simply encouraged people to pursue pleasure, Epicurus believed that all human beings do everything to gain pleasure and absorb pain. He didn’t encourage it because, according to him, that was our natural state anyway.

To defend this point, Epicurus asks everyone to look at how babies view the world around them. They don’t really understand how the world works yet, but they understand two things: when something feels good and when something feels bad. When something feels good, the baby is joyful and happy; when something feels bad, the baby cries because it wants that pain to stop and it wants to return to said pleasurable state.

I’m sure at this point you’re wondering, if we’re all solely pursuing pleasure, then what about selfless acts—acts that are done solely because they are virtuous or valuable for other people and not ourselves? How do we describe those? Well, in hedonistic ideas, it’s simply because those things make people feel heroic, which ends up being processed in your brain as a pleasurable feeling.

So, at the core, it is still pleasure they’re chasing—just not the kind we might be thinking about. According to hedonistic teachings, there are two types of pleasure: there’s moving pleasure and there’s static pleasure. Moving pleasure is when you’re in the process of satisfying a desire; when you’re hungry, you eat; when you’re thirsty, you have a drink; when you need a timeout, you take a nap.

Static pleasure is the tranquility you feel once you’re done satisfying those needs. At this point, the adrenaline has finished coursing through your veins and you’re left with a sweet feeling of satisfaction. In that moment, you feel a sense of tranquility, and you keep feeling it until it is sadly replaced by pain. Because according to Epicurus, there is no in-between. The absence of pain is pleasure, and vice versa.

But even with this more modest way of explaining hedonism, a lot of people still disagree and even frown at the idea. This is because of one thing: the idea that pleasure is the only source of intrinsic value. Think about it for a second: if pleasure is the only intrinsic value, then what do we make of things like finding meaning in life, achieving great things, building and maintaining long-lasting relationships, becoming a legend in a particular field, or even something as simple as living religiously or upholding a set of moral beliefs that we hold dear to our hearts?

Hedonists might try to argue that all of those things do not hold any value of themselves and that they are only valuable because we get pleasure from them. But something like upholding religious beliefs isn’t always pleasurable. In fact, most times, it restricts the kind of pleasure you can get. But still, it gives people a sense of fulfillment that, for them, is better than the pleasure they’re forsaking.

If self-pleasure alone is the aim of human existence, the people who benefit from the wrong that happens in our society will never fight against it. People would never fight for the common good when it might affect them negatively. But yet every day, we see people put their own desires on the side to help other people. People get excommunicated from their family, rejected by those they love, because they chose to speak up and fight for what’s right—even if the issues don’t affect them directly.

If we’re all chasing our own pleasures, that would never happen. We’d all be too busy enjoying our broken society because it benefits us, and not worrying about trying to change it for someone else. Another huge stumbling block that hedonists face when trying to argue their beliefs is the worth of reality. If pleasure is the ultimate goal, then it shouldn’t matter whether that pleasure is real or imagined, right?

If we say that people always intrinsically pursue things that are pleasurable, then if there is an option for unlimited pleasure, they should never choose anything else, right? To answer these questions, Robert Nozick created a thought experiment, giving people two options. He asked them to choose between being plugged into a pleasure-giving machine for the rest of their lives and living their current reality with the pain that exists in our world.

People always picked this reality because, in the end, living a life that’s not real is pointless and meaningless. Even with the option of the most pleasurable thing in the world, people would rather have pain that’s real. Whatever real means. As I’ve said previously, the best memories are the ones you remember with both pleasure and pain.

Twenty years after he left his childhood home, Abraham Lincoln came back, only to see the entire place in ruin. As he looked at it with tears in his eyes, he said, “My childhood home, I see again and am saddened with the view. And still, as memories cloud my brain, there’s pleasure in it too.” This beautiful mix of pleasure and pain is something that the hedonistic view of the world simply does not account for.

When you’re graduating high school, you’re excited for the adventures that await you in college. You’ll probably be leaving home for the first time, and you’ll finally be alone, able to enjoy what the world has to offer. That feeling is pleasurable, but the feeling is also painful. You’ll miss your high school friends and the simplicity of childhood. You’ll miss your parents, your siblings, and the community that you grew up in.

And though these painful thoughts cloud your brain, there will be pleasure in it too. Hedonism is frowned upon in modern-day society because it opens the door for a trap that you can easily fall into. Pleasure is an insatiable desire. If you get hungry and fill your belly, it only takes a few hours and you’re looking for something else to eat. It’s an unending pursuit. So if that becomes the entire reason for your existence, it can quickly become difficult to control.

This is how most people become addicted. It starts out as just a fleeting pleasure, and before you know it, the reason you’re doing those things stops being the pursuit of pleasure and starts being an unquenchable and uncontrollable thirst for those things—a trap that’s very difficult to come out of, one that many people get stuck in for the rest of their lives.

But this isn’t to say that we can’t learn some things from hedonistic principles. See, as much as we might not like to think about it, it’s true that tomorrow is not promised. So we might as well make the best of today. Things like making a conscious decision to enjoy the little everyday pleasures can help us lead a happier life. If your car breaks down and you have to walk to school, don’t be in haste. Embrace the journey; walk with a friend, make jokes with them, and always leave each other on a good note.

Craving a cup of coffee? Head out to your favorite coffee shop and order your favorite drink. You’ve earned it! You don’t have to wait until you’re retired before you can start reaping the fruit of your labor. Take those vacation days; the promotion can wait a few more months. Stay on that call with your friends for an extra hour; missing an hour of study probably won’t make you fail. Because even if seeking pleasure might not be the ultimate goal of human existence, it’s certainly a worthwhile pursuit.

You are a chicken. Yes, you. You look around and sometimes wonder why your owner takes such good care of you. At first, you're not sure; you're skeptical. What if he sends you to the slaughter? You've never been there, but you know very well none of your friends have ever come out of that place. You remain on high alert for when that fateful day might arrive, but it never does. Days go by, and then weeks, months, even years.

You are now convinced your owner loves you more than any of these other chickens, and he would never do anything bad to you. Each passing day is additional evidence to say that you will live for the next thousand days. A thousand beautiful days—until, of course, the thousand and first day, when the illusion of safety breaks, and you end up on someone’s dinner plate. You should have never crossed the road.

Now imagine how betrayed the chicken must have felt when it was being taken to that terrifying part of the farm. Given the thousand days' worth of evidence, the chicken’s trust in its owner was ironically at its highest level when it was eventually slaughtered. Perhaps if it wasn’t so foolish to believe that it was special or unique, maybe it would have at least been spared the feelings of betrayal that one final day completely changed the outlook of the chicken’s life. That one piece of evidence outweighed the previous thousand days, and it’s not even a contest.

This is something known as a Black Swan—a single event or observation that comes as a surprise, with disproportionate consequences radically changing our outlook about something. People used to think that swans could only be white until they saw a Black Swan, which basically reshaped the way people thought about what is out there. Nicholas Taleb wrote a book called "The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable" to study this very phenomenon and shine light on how vulnerable we are to Black Swans and how we are only becoming increasingly more vulnerable with each passing day.

In his book, he talks about some fundamentals of epistemology that limit our ability to understand the Black Swans before they happen. But first, let's talk about why our modern society—as technologically advanced as it is—is the perfect nesting place for a Black Swan event. Let’s say we’re going to weigh a few thousand people, and at the extreme end of that sample contains the heaviest person in the world. So long as that person is subject to biological constraints like the rest of us, it doesn’t really matter how much he or she weighs—let’s say 2,000 lb.

Now how much do you think that accounts for in the total weight of all the people we weighed? The answer is probably less than half a percent. It shows that even a crazy outlier like a 2,000 lb person doesn’t really overwhelm the average. Taleb calls this ecosystem mediocristan to refer to how the mediocre measurements of the average person do mostly represent all measurements quite well.

Now let’s conduct the same experiment but with wealth. Let’s gather a few people and include just one of the 3,000 or so billionaires in that list. How much do you think that billionaire accounts for in the total wealth of all the people in that sample? An overwhelming majority—almost always close to 99%—contrary to the first scenario here, the outlier overwhelms everything else. Taleb calls this world extremistan, as it rewards a few people extremely well but leaves basically nothing for the others.

Taleb says that the modern world is composed of circumstances that are geared towards extremistan, not mediocristan. Because money, for all intents and purposes, is just a number in someone’s book. The vast majority of money is completely digital; it’s not subject to physics laws or biology to constrain it to minimal variance. Sure, most people don’t make that much money, but a few people can make a lot of money.

Similarly, if you want to consider musicians, most musicians don’t sell that many albums, but if a few artists sell quite a few, you can conduct the same thought experiment with book sales, scientific publications, shoe brands, and so on. The point is, the modern economy is very much a win-or-take-all system that rewards a very small number of people with a disproportionately large portion of the pie. If it was more like the weight example we just talked about, you wouldn’t expect the outliers to be so wild, but the fact that they really are indeed so wild just goes to show how unpredictable the environment we’re living in really is.

The forecasts we take for granted today often fail to take into account the true nature of this unpredictability—these Black Swan events. You might be inclined to say that no, these billionaires put in the work day in and day out, and therefore they can enjoy the fruits of their labor. Indeed, most of them probably worked really hard. Some of their innovations might later pave the way for a better future for all of us; I’m not discounting that.

However, the system is not rewarding them proportionately. More importantly, it’s hard to say how much of their efforts are the fruits of their labor and how much of it is due to pure chance. If you were to run a few simulations with extremistan-type circumstances, you would inevitably have a few Jeff Bezos-like outliers. We may be biased into thinking that we understand what causes Bezos-like outliers in our society—you know, the usual: think out of the box, start a revolutionary company, work extremely hard for a few years, and then smell the roses—as much as happily ever after.

We’ve all read the autobiographies; we’ve all watched the documentaries. However, when was the last time you read about a person who did all of those things and failed? When was the last time you saw shelves of books about people who failed? Chances are, probably never. These stories just never really quite make it. There is an epistemic bias in all of this, Taleb says.

Now take a look at the cemetery. It’s quite difficult to do so because people who fail don’t seem to write memoirs, and if they did, those business publishers I know would not even consider giving them the courtesy of a returned phone call. This is despite the fact that often advice about what not to do is more useful than what to do. But that’s just the economy; that’s just one facet of society.

We also don’t understand the socio-political aspects. Take 9/11 for example, which is certainly a Black Swan event. After it happened, you had tons of experts come out and say that they had known for years that it was about to happen. Well, why didn’t they say anything? This retrospective distortion of the understanding of a problem is one of the hallmarks of a Black Swan event. None of them really knew. If they did, cockpit doors would have been bulletproof long ago, pocket knives would have never been allowed into cabins, and the TSA would have been invented much earlier.

But these things were only instituted after 9/11. If you were to suggest such policies in 1991, for example, you would probably not be taken too seriously or would have been shown a spreadsheet that suggested airlines don’t have the money for bulletproof doors. But inevitably, they did. Thankfully, the likelihood of a 9/11-style event is much lower now than it used to be. Countries around the world are more prepared, more vigilant.

However, that also makes these precautions somewhat lose their relevance. You all know Yuval Noah Harari; in his book "Homo Deus," he cites a paradox about knowledge. He says, knowledge that does not change behavior is useless, but knowledge that changes behavior loses its relevance. The more data we have and the better we understand history, the faster history alters its course, and the faster our knowledge becomes outdated.

Despite the measures we have taken for a Black Swan event like 9/11, that does nothing to improve our odds against a future Black Swan. If anything, it might lure us into a false sense of security and, in fact, worsen our chances of coping with the impacts of the next highly improbable event. We tend to convince ourselves that we understand risks once we have understood a game of dice or blackjack.

However, trying to approximate the risks in real life with the same methods used in a closed loop artificial game is simply an oversimplification. A mistake that we commit daily. Taleb calls this the ludic fallacy. We learned simple games and immediately conclude that the stock market works in the same way, even though one of these things lives in mediocristan and the other lives in extremistan.

If the markets were well understood, do you think something like GameStop or AMC would have ever been allowed to happen? Sure, short squeezing is not a particularly new phenomenon, and yet even a non-Black Swan event such as this one left even the smartest hedge fund managers scratching their heads and practically chasing bankruptcy. This false sense of understanding makes Black Swans that much more dangerous.

There are other reasons why we are increasingly more vulnerable to Black Swans. Taleb says whereas in the past, people might have been studying different kinds of literature and diving deep into a locally developed set of ideas, today arguably the most spread book is Harry Potter. That’s of course not to say Harry Potter is a bad book or anything, but it goes to show that we are much less in tune with each other’s ideas, for better or for worse.

For the most part, everyone is dealing with generally the same ideas. That, coupled with the rising complexity and reach of technology, means when something fails, it fails for more people than ever before. The Pakistani government tried to shut down YouTube in Pakistan; it ended up shutting down YouTube worldwide.

We don’t understand these things. That’s just one way for technology to fail, but it goes to show how interconnected things are. And while that is often touted as a plus, given sufficiently poor luck, that can really spell doom for us all. Take coronal mass ejections as an example. These are regular bursts of radiation from the Sun that scientists on Earth know and expect. The largest coronal mass ejection ever on record is the Carrington event in 1859.

Its effects were mostly felt by telegraph operators, who had some of their equipment burnt from the sudden surge. Most of the world went on without a hitch. On the other hand, if a Carrington-class event were to occur today, with all the grids, electric cars, and equipment that we now have, the damages would be in the trillions of dollars, and repair could take decades, if at all possible.

And with each passing day, with each little transition into an electric future, we’re becoming more and more vulnerable to such an event. The thing is, this isn’t even a Black Swan event. In 2012, the likelihood of occurring to an event in the next decade was calculated to be around 12%. And yet despite that high probability, we’re not particularly prepared for such an event. Given the esoteric nature of its risk—seemingly low probability but high impact—despite all the mounting evidence, you’ll have a very hard time convincing governments to make modifications to power grids to avoid catastrophic failures.

So if that’s how little we care about an event that we know is bound to occur eventually, imagine how unaware we are of a true Black Swan. The chicken on the farm, if it were to somehow be spared by some miracle, would never trust another human being ever after the betrayal it endured. However, few are ever so lucky. Meanwhile, for the owner, the chicken’s death comes as no surprise. It is a routine event and, therefore, no Black Swan.

The idea of a Black Swan is therefore relative to the knowledge one possesses. Hence our objective is to try and be in the position of the butcher, not the butchered. Taleb says, “I worry less about advertised and sensational risks, more about the vicious hidden ones.”

Of course, the idea of a Black Swan also incorporates good things, such as wildly unlikely positive outcomes of chance—otherwise known as luck. The odds of being born are one in 400 trillion. But to be fair, I just unfollowed my own advice. Such a thing can’t really be predicted, can it?

For all we know and for all we don’t, being born is an unimaginably unlikely event that nobody really predicted. So if you are alive, whatever that means, in the end, we’re actually all the Black Swans we’ve been trying to avoid the entire time. Ironic, isn’t it?

Are you the type of person to analyze every second of the interaction you just had with someone for hours on end, or are you normal? Either way, you probably don’t think all that hard about every single detail of the decisions you make in social situations. But believe it or not, there’s an entire scientific field that applies to social situations and decision-making. We’re talking about game theory.

Game theory can be used to analyze both economic and social situations. It’s essentially the science of strategy. And just like the reality of just trying to model, game theory can get really complicated. And yes, although game theory is relevant to games as we typically understand them, such as poker, most research in game theory focuses on how groups of people interact.

Let’s first define what a game is. So what exactly is a game? It sounds like a stupid question—like who doesn’t know what a game is? But games in the field of game theory are a slightly different concept to what you might expect. When it comes to game-theoretic analysis, a game constitutes any interaction between multiple people where each person’s payoff is affected by the decisions made by others.

Let’s apply this definition of a game to a couple of situations. Is Sudoku a game? Well, in the traditional sense, sure. But in game theory, no. Sudoku is not a game because how you decide to complete the puzzle doesn’t affect any other player. There is, after all, only one player in the game—you.

What about tic-tac-toe? Is that a game? Two players can play the game, and each box that is filled by one of the players affects the other player. Winning requires both players to respond optimally to what the other player is doing. So yes, it is a game.

You could also have a situation where two shop owners choose from a finite number of positions where to strategically place their shops for maximum profit. They are each affected by what the other person does since they may be opting for the same market, and there’s certainly a win-lose situation here. So even though placing your shop may not sound like much of a game in the eyes of game theorists, it certainly is.

Game theory is the study of games like these, and game theorists try to model games in a way that makes them easy to understand and analyze. I say easy, but a lot of games can end up having pretty similar properties or reoccurring patterns, and more often than not, things can get pretty complicated.

Game theory has two main focuses: cooperative games and non-cooperative games. Most game theory models involve five conditions. It goes something like this: first, each player has two or more choices or sequences of choices—think of these like typical moves in a game, like moving a chess piece. Second, all possible combinations of decisions or plays result in a clear outcome. Basically, you can win or lose.

Third, it’s clear how you can win or lose, and participants will gain or lose something depending on the outcome. Fourth, the players know the rules of the game as well as the payoffs of other players, meaning everyone is aware of what is desirable to the other players as well. And fifth, the players are rational and sensible people. Rational here means strictly that when they’re faced with two alternatives, they’ll choose the option that provides the greatest benefits.

While players know the rules and their opponents’ options, they don’t know their opponents’ actual decisions in advance, so players must choose options based on assumptions of what their opponents might choose. Some game theory scenarios are zero-sum games, meaning one player’s win is another’s loss, and vice versa.

Others, however, allow mutual gains and losses. These games can involve multiple strategies; you can try to minimize the maximum losses another player can cause and make decisions based on probable outcomes. This all really just sounds a bit confusing, so here, just let me show you.

If life is indeed a game, then the first rule is to be skeptical of other people’s suggestions. As we said, if it’s a game, someone else is going to be competing, so there’s definitely going to be competition and sabotage. Perhaps a straightforward and well-known example is the prisoner’s dilemma. The game goes like this: two criminals are caught red-handed and are arrested. Each has two choices—they can either stay quiet or testify against their friend.

Upon arrest, they are each separated and offered a deal: testify against your friend, and we’ll let you off the hook easy—with one year in prison—and give the other person ten years. If both stay quiet, the cops can’t really prove the more serious charges, and both criminals would spend only two years behind bars. If they both testify against each other, however, then both would get five-year prison sentences.

At first glance, keeping quiet seems like the best strategy. If they both did this, they would both be out after just two years. But right before they’re about to testify, one of the two thinks to himself, “What if I stay quiet and the other guy rats me out?” Without knowing what the other person is actually going to decide, it’s a reasonable worry to have.

The smartest solution to this would be to react in a way that is beneficial regardless of what the other person does. A Nash equilibrium is actually a state in which no one person can improve given what the others are doing. This means you’re picking the best response to a particular strategy from your opponent. A quick analysis of the prisoner’s dilemma reveals they would both most likely testify, which is the Nash equilibrium for this problem.

This is because, regardless of what the other person does, testifying will lead to a maximum sentence of five years, with the potential for a one-year sentence. Meanwhile, if you don’t testify, you could end up with a ten-year term. It’s easily the safest thing to do, considering neither party knows what the other is going to do. Even though both criminals are better off if they just stayed quiet, here the individual incentive wins over group interest.

Testifying is a better option because you know that you’ll be in trouble if you stay quiet, but your friend testifies. But if you can think of that, your friend can too, so he knows you’re likely going to testify, given that it’s the safer option for you, and you know he’s likely going to testify too for the same reason. And you know that he knows that you’re likely going to testify. You see the loop that’s forming.

These types of problems are examples of non-cooperative games, which means the two prisoners can’t convey their intentions to each other. If they were able to talk to each other, however, we would be in a cooperative setting, and that would affect the likelihood of certain outcomes. As you can imagine, for example, it’d become much easier for them to agree beforehand that they’re both just going to stay quiet.

On the contrary, a coordination game is one in which everyone benefits from working together. There’s no incentive for either party to cheat since it will result in a worse outcome than if they just cooperated. A good example is driving on the correct side of the road. You win nothing by driving on the wrong side of the road, but sometimes you lose without even playing.

The principal-agent problem is when one person is allowed to make decisions on behalf of another person. In this situation, the first person is likely to prioritize their own interests and pursue their own goals. And well, yeah, that’s the basis of modern politics. Game theory can also be applied to biology, though. In fact, its application in the field of biology has allowed biologists to answer a lot of questions about evolution, which is remarkable since game theory was never designed for this.

For example, it’s helped scientists explain biological altruism, where an organism acts in a way that is most favorable for the overall species, even if that action is harmful to itself. A bird might warn the rest of the group about the arrival of a predator, doing so risks its own life since it essentially announces itself to the predator, but this trait can later help that bird, assuming it survives, of course, when other birds return the favor and warn it.

These concepts might help you anticipate some of the strategies others might be using to get one over on you, but who really knows what they’re thinking? The concept of guessing other’s moves is what makes the game so tricky. While each player is likely to be certain about only their own move, they still have to speculate about other players’ decisions and, more importantly, other players’ conception of every other player’s decision.

Essentially, you are no longer making a decision based on what you think is right; rather, you’re anticipating what your opponent thinks is right and simply reacting to it. But then again, your opponent is doing the same exact thing. So who’s really making the decision here? Whose mind is the actual decision being made in? Let’s put it another way: each player must know their own chance of coming out on top, guess everyone else’s chance, and also guess what everyone else is guessing about their own chances of winning.

Not only this, but you also really need to be able to guess what other players are guessing about your guesses about them. And now look, we’re confused again. Another problem is that although game theory has many benefits, it would be impossible to properly apply it in all situations. There will be times where rationality might not offer the right solutions, or mutual benefit might not be the most ideal outcome.

When you come up against these, you have to not only recognize them, but then also decide whether using game theory would be the most helpful way to deal with the situation. By then, the moment could already be gone. The assumption that everyone is going to be rational is a basic premise of game theory; it is also a really risky one. Humans can be extremely unpredictable and emotional, and this makes the guessing work near impossible.

There’s a ton of real-life examples that illustrate the basic concepts of game theory. Apple and Samsung are involved in an endless game of advertising. It’s not like either company needs to advertise; besides, advertising can get extremely expensive. So why not just forego this task altogether and use the money for research and development? If both companies did this, then we’d probably have better phones by now.

But sure enough, Apple banks on the possibility of Samsung advertising in and gaining an edge over the market, and Samsung does the same, and that possibility soon turns into a certainty. You and I have all come to accept; now this is an extremely simplistic example that bypasses many other variables, but you see the basic concept.

Another good everyday example can be found in the treatment of public goods and property. If everyone decides to be good citizens and not litter, society benefits as a whole. But you’re inevitably going to come up against one or more people who choose to essentially go rogue and behave selfishly by littering. This leads to society as a whole bearing the cost of cleaning up, all the while making not littering a less worthwhile decision.

After all, if the road’s already littered, the work to not litter is that much less meaningful. You can probably now see how applicable this is to other situations in life, like every big important decision we’re supposed to be fixing—more on that later.

As interesting as it is, game theory can still only analyze simple situations with well-defined constraints, and you must remember that any model is a subset of reality. No matter how good it is, it’s essentially intellectual guesswork. The bottom line? We’re all constantly in the game. It’s pretty impossible not to be. Our lives are endlessly and unavoidably impacted by the actions and decisions made by others. So you might as well play the game the best you can.

And that interaction you spent hours analyzing after the other person has already long forgotten it? Maybe it’s not such a bad thing after all. We’re just trying to win the game of life, and the reason to win—the goal—is so that you can be free of it.

I have a pretty serious confession to make: I don’t like Superman. Before you destroy me in the comments, I know it’s an unpopular opinion, but the Man of Steel has just never resonated with me. The problem for me has always been that he’s too strong. I mean, one of his primary powers is invulnerability. Talk about a tension killer—the conflict is never if Superman will save the day, only how.

This apparent infallibility extends to his personality as well. He’s a character utterly without flaws. The biggest strike against him is that he’s too compassionate, and this can sometimes land him in trouble. That’s the answer you give when you’re asked in a job interview what your biggest weakness is—it’s not really a weakness.

This relentlessly upright persona in general makes Superman feel distant. His character is, pardon the pun, completely alien to my own experience, and if I’m being honest, it’s not all that interesting to me. Superman is boring. I prefer my heroes to be messier characters. Characters like Batman, Wolverine, and Deadpool feel so much more human. They’re flawed; they can make mistakes, and sometimes they do bad things for the wrong reasons.

And I’m sure I’m not the only one that feels this way. Over the last two decades, anti-heroes have become increasingly popular. In fact, the top three highest-grossing R-rated films of all time are 2019’s "Joker," followed by both "Deadpool" movies. But why is this? Why have so many of us turned our backs on characters like Superman and Captain America?

To understand that, we first need to figure out what exactly an anti-hero is. Unfortunately, as it turns out, this is easier said than done. We all know an anti-hero when we see one. They’re dark, gritty, usually a bit reckless, and make questionable life decisions. However, the term itself is difficult to define. Anti-heroes, as we know them today, are a relatively new concept, and the parameters are fuzzy at best.

At its most basic level, the anti-hero is a subversion of the hero trope. They are whatever a hero is not. In a technical sense, this means giving them characteristics normally reserved for an antagonist. They might drink and curse, have an abrasive personality, or rail against authority. The problem with this description, though, is that it’s negatively defined, meaning it’s rooted solely in its opposition to something else. This doesn’t tell us what an anti-hero is; merely what it is not.

This is further complicated by the fact that what characteristics constitute a hero vary over time and between cultures. Heroes, in the truest sense, are meant to represent the ideals of a society. They stand as living personifications of the values that citizens should strive to emulate. However, these ideals and values naturally evolve alongside the beliefs and needs of the population.

This applies to anti-heroes as well; traits seen as un- or anti-heroic change based on the cultural context. In 1962, Canadian missionary Don Richardson traveled to Western New Guinea and Indonesia to try and convert members of the indigenous Sai tribe to Christianity. He encountered some trouble, though, when his potential congregation identified Judas, not Jesus Christ, as the hero of the story. It turned out that the Sai people placed a higher value on trickery and deception than sacrifice.

They saw Jesus as little more than an unwitting sucker who had been duped by the true hero of the narrative. A better way, then, of defining heroes and anti-heroes might be by judging them based on their moral consistency. Heroes, by their nature, are morally consistent. They have a strict set of dedicated principles they follow that guide their actions. Anti-heroes, on the other hand, are morally ambiguous. They operate in gray areas and are more fluid in their decision-making.

This ambiguity can manifest either in the anti-hero’s own personal ethics or in the way that they’re perceived by society. Not every anti-hero needs to be an edgy, homicidal maniac cracking one-liners as they shish kebab bad guys with katanas. In fact, the classic anti-hero archetype looks a lot less like Deadpool and more like your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.

I know what you’re thinking: Spider-Man’s not an anti-hero. But even by the traditional definition, he kind of is. When Peter Parker is first bitten by a radioactive spider and gifted with superhuman abilities, he doesn’t want to become the savior of New York. He’s insecure, anxious, and wavers in his convictions, even allowing a criminal to escape as an act of revenge against a boxing organizer who cheated him out of his winnings.

Over the course of his career, Peter quits multiple times, always questioning whether or not he’s capable of overcoming the challenges given to him and living up to his responsibilities. None of these are qualities that we normally associate with heroes. Peter is inconsistent, and our perception of him doesn’t align with the image that we’ve built up in our heads.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are anti-heroes like Wade Wilson—Deadpool—who we normally associate more with the term. These are heroes who do the right thing for the wrong reason or the wrong thing for the right reason. Deadpool is firmly in this camp. Particularly in the comics, he’s a mercenary first, concerned solely with how any given situation benefits him.

Even in the films, his story begins as a revenge trip. Yes, his objective is to take down a cartel of human traffickers manufacturing and selling mutants into slavery, but he’s only doing this as retribution for his own disfigurement. His motivation isn’t to break up the smuggling ring or free the captives; he just wants to fix his face. To say that Deadpool’s morals are loose is generous; he is entirely self-interested, recklessly individualistic, and more than a little murder happy.

If he ends up saving the day, it’s typically just an unintended byproduct of his actual goals. The key takeaway from this is that anti-heroes are hard to pin down when it comes to assigning moral judgments, either because their own ethical code is so nebulous, or because we as a society have difficulty reconciling their personal traits with our own expectations of what a hero should be. So why do we like these characters so much? Why are we attracted to moral ambiguity?

Perhaps it’s because we find it reflective of our own experiences. Very few of us live in a world of simple black-and-white morality. We recognize that life is more complex than good versus evil or right versus wrong, hero versus villain. People are complicated; our decisions are nuanced and subject to interpretation. No one is purely a villain or even a hero for that matter, and yet our culture is dominated by institutions built on the foundation of moral absolutism.

This philosophy maintains that human action is inherently right or wrong, regardless of intention or consequence. The justification for this is a belief in an all-encompassing and objective morality. Every individual’s behavior is judged according to the standard and determined to be moral based on how closely they can conform. Political and religious institutions are the clearest examples of this.

They create extensive sets of laws and regulations by appealing to the authority of a higher power, whether that power is a divine being or a constitution. The benefit is that this creates consistent standards, which can be broadly and reliably applied to any situation. This helps maintain societal order while safeguarding institutional power.

However, when these laws are violated, it necessitates punishment regardless of individual circumstances. Take for example a man who steals medicine in order to care for his sick child. Although his motivation is pure, in the act itself, noble theft is still illegal. If he’s caught, he faces imprisonment, if not worse, depending on who’s in charge.

While creating a reliable and predictable framework by which behaviors can be evaluated, the problem with moral absolutism is that it’s inflexible and doesn’t allow for subjective interpretation. Instead, it promotes the idea that there’s an objective morality by which every act can be judged. In becoming symbols of societal ideals, traditional heroes serve as the physical embodiment of these absolutist systems.

More than that, they act as enforcers, ready to use violence in order to combat perceived evils and protect the established moral order. This is why I don’t like Superman. Ironically enough, the Man of Tomorrow is a champion of the status quo. He, Captain America, and others like them defend social and political structures as they already exist, regardless of their flaws.

To his credit, I don’t think Superman would punish someone for stealing medicine for their sick child, but he definitely will protect the systems that originally put that person in that position. By intention, moral absolutism creates a societal binary: those who conform and those who do not. Anti-heroes are a part of the second group. Their innate moral ambiguity naturally places them in opposition to mainstream culture, landing them in the realm of the outsider.

These individuals find themselves shunned or even outcast