What Is Ignorance Bliss?

Some people believe that thinking about things in depth will do nothing but make you malcontent, and that one should float along through life without looking at the fine print. “Ignorance is bliss” is the mantra that these people follow, and the underlying reason for why people decide to choose this path of life is closely linked to how basic human nature is programmed in everybody. This is in reference to how the human brain will naturally rationalize negative situations in hard to detect, discreet ways, all in the name of your brain trying to protect your emotional system. Ignorance, may, in fact, be bliss. Naturally, your brain will try to nourish itself, and that includes making sure it is in a positive emotional state whenever possible,
Typically, the brain will try and comb through the situation for something it can hold in a positive light, even if they never would have thought of the event as anything but negative had it never happened to them, “but once we’ve actually been heartbroken and humiliated in front of our family, friends, and florists, our brains begin shopping for a less dreadful view- and as we’ve seen, the human brain is one smart shopper” (Gilbert 132). The very moment that something bad happens to a person, their brain is immediately scrambling to grasp onto something that can be taken away from the situation, even if the brain has to trick itself. In order to prove the emotional weight of self deception, studies have been conducted which say, “people of every age and in every walk of life seem to regret not having done things much more than they regret things they did… the psychological immune system has a more difficult time manufacturing positive and credible views of inactions than of actions” (Gilbert 135). Being able to juxtapose how people react to the same negative outcome with and without deceiving themselves. When someone experiences a negative event in their life due to a chance they took or something they did, they will
Through collective data studies have shown that self deception will once again enlarge an individual’s chance to be happy, “just as explanations ameliorate the impact of unpleasant events, so too do they ameliorate the impact of pleasant events” (Gilbert 140). Which proves the point that self deception will lead to happiness, because in the absence of explanations, one will have to deceive themselves into believing in one they made up. In these situations an explanation will not usually serve to reverse how the person feels and upset them, but instead just lower how enthusiastic the person was about the outcome. This is because when a person cannot explain the why for a situation they will fill in the blanks with a plausible filler that will satisfy them emotionally. Sometimes, when the truth ends up seeming sub-par when initial expectations were set way above the bar. In these cases, the people involved would have remained a bit happier had they never been exposed to the reality of the situation. In this case, you can tell self deception directly correlates to happiness levels because people who deceived themselves in the same situation as those who did not found more satisfaction in their fabricated truth than others did in the true