Welcome to This Should Have Been an Email - a whimsical weekly publication exploring some of my silly thoughts and the odd childhood trauma. Care to join me for a ride?
Last week, I wrote about the Napoleon complex and how overcompensating can drive some harmful behaviours in our lives. On this topic, my wife accurately pointed out that my efforts to overcompensate are also the cause of why I end up getting hurt or falling over in unfortunate places during our holidays (like Lac Léman in Geneva).
Click here to read last week’s letter.
Ahem [clears throat]… but moving on from my clumsiness, let’s talk about today, and by today I mean the short holiday trip I took with my wife and my mother-in-law a couple of years ago.
There was an odd period in the summer of 2020 when the UK tried to return to normality after 3 months of lockdown. Still, international travel was virtually banned thus going out on a “staycation” became a thing.
Staycation (noun)
A holiday that you take near your home (or without going abroad). If you are in the UK, it will be 2x more expensive than going to Cyprus for a full week all-inclusive.
My staycation consisted of a 5-day road trip from Colchester (East Anglia) to Barafundle Bay (South West Wales).
There were some fascinating stops along the way, including:
Blenheim Palace: home of the Churchill family since it was gifted to John Churchill, 1st Duke of Malborough, in 1704.
Bath: a city built by Romans in the 1st century AD which is famous for its thermal spas.
Tenby: one of South Wales's top seaside towns.
Brecon Beacons National Park: I fell on my arse while hiking here. On a different note, this place is full of sheep! 🐑
Stonehenge: an alien landing spot.
Throughout the whole trip, I constantly joked with my wife about how the existence of Stonehenge didn’t make sense from a logistic perspective. The amount of effort, planning and ingenuity needed to extract, transport, shape and erect the stones seemed absolutely mind-boggling.
What is worse, historians still don’t know who moved dozens (or hundreds) of sarsen stones, each weighing an average of 25 tonnes - equivalent to 10 Range Rovers - to build this enigmatic monument in the middle of nowhere.
The monument's mysterious past has spawned countless tales and theories. According to folklore, Stonehenge was created by Merlin, the wizard of Arthurian legend, who magically transported the massive stones from Ireland, where giants had assembled them. Another legend says invading Danes put the stones up, and another theory says they were the ruins of a Roman temple. Modern-day interpretations are no less colorful: some argue that Stonehenge is a spacecraft landing area for aliens, and even more say it's a giant fertility symbol in the shape of female genitalia.
The human brain tends to fill in the blanks to make sense of the world around us. When we are fed data, we can be guilty of autocompleting and taking shortcuts to compensate for bits that are unclear or missing. Often, we are not consciously trying to do so, but our brains jump to make predictions or assumptions in an attempt to save energy and respond quickly.
Think of the times you listened to a song and heard words that were not there in the first place (phonemic restoration effect). Think of those “miraculous” events where people found the face of Jesus Christ on a slice of bread (patternicity).
Our consciousness craves certainty and clear information, yet the wiring of our own brain gets in the way of that. Sometimes, we manufacture a reality that pleases both our conscious self and the entangled functioning of our brain.
In most cases, the result of this involuntary practice is harmless or even beneficial for day-to-day activities. Cooking, driving, and having repetitive social interactions with your co-workers at 9 am would be a lot more stressful if our brains weren’t constantly trying to be one step ahead.
However, this tendency to fill the gaps with inaccurate information is a risky game. What happens when a hundred or a thousand people autocomplete the blanks around a certain topic with their manufactured version of reality?
Well, this happens:
Don’t get me wrong - I love a good conspiracy theory as much as the next person. There are many psychological and societal reasons to explain how they are born and why we believe them. Conspiracy theories have always been around, even before misinformation was weaponised on the internet, and some turned out to be true which reinforces the idea that some sinister actors move in the shadows, hiding information and promoting their own interests.
Pssst! Did you know that if you write “Illuminati” backwards it reads “Itanimulli”?
Did you also know that Itanimulli.com redirects you to the website of the US National Security Agency? 🤨
To believe all conspiracy theories that come our way would be stupid. Likewise, to pretend that powerful groups and institutions (public and private) are always transparent with information is equally dumb.
Ron Funches makes an eloquent point about conspiracy theories that summarises how I feel about them:
All this talk takes me back to Stonehenge. Why, you ask?
You see, the conspiracy theory I *choose* to believe in is that aliens visited Earth in the past and made contact with some of our ancient civilisations.
There, I said and I stand by it. I will die on this hill with my tinfoil hat on.
Stonehenge? Aliens. The Pyramids of Giza? Aliens. Our ancient yet accurate knowledge of Astronomy? Aliens.
I should clarify that my belief in this theory works pretty much like Christianity: there are piles of evidence to disprove it, but my faith is blinding like the love of Jesus himself. I also acknowledge that believing in “Ancient Aliens” underestimates humanity itself while robbing our ancestors of the credit they are due.
But apart from that, it is a harmless belief and a good ice-breaker for conversation. This nonsense was also one of the first things that got me into astrophysics. Needless to say, it includes a lot of unsupported claims, pseudoscience and gibberish, like the idea that aliens got rid of dinosaurs to make way for humans.
But hey, who does not love a good alien story, even if it is 100% manufactured?
Talking about aliens, UFOs (now branded UAPs by the US government) have been everywhere in the news this month. It’s been reported that the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) shot down 4 “objects” in different locations, less than 10 days apart from each other.
Amid the uncertainty and the lack of information about these events, our brains did their usual things filling in the blanks and decided that aliens must be behind this. Many media outlets and content creators rallied behind this possibility which forced the Whitehouse to address the issue saying that “there is no indication of alien or extraterrestrial activity in relation to these takedowns…”
It’s good to know we don’t have to worry about an alien invasion in the middle of a global economic recession.
Johnny Harris, who you might know as the guy who uncovered the truth as to why McDonald’s ice cream machines are always broken, put together a decent video about UFOs that offers a balanced view of the evidence the US has collected and declassified over the years and what it means to the prospect of aliens visiting Earth.
True to be told, I am tired of living historical events. Hopefully, aliens will continue to find the human race as uninteresting and unthreatening as always, so we can carry on figuring out how to live worthy lives, coming up with conspiracy theories and writing more pointless publications like this one.
I will be back next Wednesday to brighten up your day with another letter. In the meantime, please share this post with a friend and help yourself to great reads:
Patternicity: Finding Meaningful Patterns in Meaningless Noise
Speaking of Psychology: Why people believe in conspiracy theories, with Karen Douglas, PhD
Peace out,
C.