In this season (and, perhaps, series) finale, we recap what exactly we are trying to do here: we are thinking about thinking and considering our options when it comes to how we choose to pilot our lives. By being mindful of our thinking, not instantly reacting to stimuli and situations, we can manage to take as much control as we consciously can of our lives, given our condition, our environment, and our time. And when we really deconstruct our collective, cultural notions of success and morality, we can become even more free to be who we are, and we can get a little bit better at being us every day.

You cannot control the circumstances of your life. You are in an environment that you didn't choose, working with values that you didn't choose, trying to choose to do something that matters to you. Your sphere of influence is exceedingly limited, and if you just borrow meaning from the world around you, you risk being at the whim of this environment. A sense of purpose that transcends your job description, that reaches beyond even the importance of your own livelihood can help your mental health and definition of success far more than anything else. What is it that you want your existence in this world to say? Building upon everything we've learned about critical thinking, lateral thinking, and emotional intelligence, this is the lecture to pay attention to.

The primary way in which we humanize ourselves is through fiction. Sounds like an insane hyperbole, but fiction is the distinctive factor of personhood, above all else. Through fiction, we have built massive social structures, directed collective effort, and essentially created a new world (for better or worse, y'all). This is why literary analysis is such an important and often overlooked skill that is taught in school. As a matter of fact, it's generally taught wrong, as a kind of sideshow act that is adjunct to reading. But detecting, distilling, and articulating the messages found in literature is a power that is not only important, but dynamic.

How we talk might seem like it makes sense, is natural, and is the right way to communicate; however, many, many arbitrary habits and norms have been built into how we code our own communication. While we communicate directly, indirectly, and through metamessages, we build trust, competition, or intimacy with the people we are in communication with. Misunderstandings are rife, conflicts are increased, and we all fail to make ourselves heard more often that we think is reasonable. The truth is, our communication style is distinct; it is not hard-wired, but is a habit that we have been indoctrinated into through our social conditioning; gender identification, social group, ethnic traditions, economic status, neighborhood--all of these have an impact on how we communicate. Switching codes is intentional, sometimes, but can be learned through reading great literature.

Logic, intelligence, and strategy are great, but as great as those things are, they are not good predictors of happiness, wealth, or success. One place where the structure of formalized education really fails us is in dealing with emotional intelligence. In order to access all the aspects of human happiness that aren't direct constructs, you have to have a good understanding of your own internal emotional life. While you develop this starting with your first breaths, it grows and is refined all your life. There are ways to develop and grow this ability intentionally. Want to be more positive, experience less anxiety, and have a happier life? Let's go.

Hopefully, by now, you've begun to distrust some of the conclusions that you come to. I don't want you to question your own alignment here, wondering if you're in fact a good person or not or whatever, but to question the justifications and basic truths that you aren't used to questioning. In order to apply this, it's necessary to come up with a systematic way to consider decisions, projects, and changes in your life. Time to put on your thinking hats!

Not being boring about actual information can be a challenge, but herein, we try. How we are informed about the happenings of the world is important to how firmly and reliably we understand the outside world. This is something that we can all take for granted in "The Information Age," but more than ever we need to apply our skeptics hat. Headlines are plenty, but the in-depth knowledge that lies behind headlines is harder to access; what's more, we barely want to access more in-depth information, most of the time. But when it matters, we need to be vigilant so that we don't spread misinformation, a habit that has literally be weaponized against the entire country in the last decade.

We construct a narrative that paints us in a pleasing light, not matter how far we may stray from the ideals that we think we hold dear. Our brains are excellent at doubling-down on bad decisions in an effort to resolve the dissonance in our heads as we try to hold two truths that conflict with each other. One of the biggest driving forces behind all of this is based on the biases in our minds that we don't even see. In an effort to make the world into a story where we are the heroes, we lose the ability to see the world clearly; history itself is driven by this folly. If we are going to actually use critical reasoning, we have to dispel this illusion.

We have a high degree of confidence in ourselves; in our opinions, our understanding, and our daily version of the world that we see around us. We also have a high degree of confidence in the experts around us, of every walk. However, we probably shouldn't? The world is not what we think it is, and we react in bizarre, irrational ways that only employ our System 1 emotional, reactive thinking most of the time. Let's look at what we can do to stop that knee-jerk picture of reality in our heads. In this episode, we have the thesis of Season Two. 

Why do we bother with the formality of skepticism and the scientific method? These ideas seem so familiar as to represent basis of how we normally think, but this falls into yet another one of those cognitive illusions that we are so prone. There are vast holes in our knowledge that come from what we believe, rather than what we know. In order to build reliable systems of knowledge, from which we can create practical applications, we have to apply a formalized system of checking and rechecking what we feel is true. Thus, Critical Reasoning relies on skepticism and the scientific method. It means that we can only verify things that can be disproven and only accept knowledge that is proven repeatedly. This episode looks at some differences between knowledge and belief.