Review: Gonzales, Everyday Survival

[truepenny]

Everyday Survival: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things by Laurence Gonzales

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


The subtitle of the book is "Why Smart People Do Stupid Things," and the tl;dr answer is "because they're not paying attention." Gonzales is arguing that there are a lot of things in our lives that we* aren't paying enough attention to--he talks about what he calls a "vacation state of mind"--and discussing what happens when we don't pay attention, both in terms of what our brains do, the automatic scripts that run because (a) this situation is LIKE another situation, or (b) this script has always worked in this situation before (He doesn't mention the terrible fire in the London Underground, where a woman had people walk right by her into the boiling greasy smoke as she was trying desperately to get them to stop. Because that script had always worked before.) and in terms of what happens when an automatic script runs that isn't appropriate.

I was disappointed by this book because it is a bait and switch. Most of what Gonzales is talking about isn't why smart people do stupid things; he's really talking about why we are destroying our environment and how we can make ourselves stop, a question which requires him to go all the way back to the Big Bang to make his argument. Please note, I don't disagree with him about the importance of that question, but (1) that's really not what I was hoping for and (2) he is terribly didactic, and that's offputting whether I agree with him or not. I don't even want to be put off by it, since (not being stupid) I do think the topic is important and I thought his take was interesting and useful, but I spent half the book feeling like he was beating me over the head with a hammer.

And I really would have liked more on the original question, because what he had was fascinating.

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*For the purposes of this book "we" are middle-class Americans. "We" are decidedly not anyone else.



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Comments

[g33kgrrl]

Slightly off-topic but I've now been trying to find out more about this London Underground fire you mention and I can't figure it out by googling. (I have read a lot about other London Underground fires but nothing that matches that incident.) Can you share any more information?

[truepenny]

There's a Forensic Files episode about it, not that that helps.

It's the fire that started underneath the wooden escalators, and the escalator shaft then acted as a sort of flue. I think I got the detail about the woman trying to stop people from Survival Psychology.

I cannot remember when it was, but I want to say the 1960s.

[g33kgrrl]

yes, the one I've read most about was the same one then! I just hadn't found any about that detail and it keeps horrifying me.

We do tend to watch a lot of Forensic Files so I'm sure we'll come across it at some point. Although once our child became cognizant of the television and started repeating "baby fall window" to all and sundry after an episode of Jonathan Frakes' Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction? where a baby fell out of a window but was MIRACULOUSLY saved by a pillow delivery truck or something that went on a street they'd NEVER BEEN ON BEFORE, we've had to curtail certain viewing after fearing that people would think she had fallen out of a window and we were pretty blasé about it.

That was wildly off topic.