What if keeping the peace seems safer–but it’s actually riskier long-term?

Did you know that our brains don’t actually work very well at the things we think they’re great at?

I’ve said it multiple times on the podcast and we always get comments about it: your brain is a malfunctioning supercomputer. It gets fed so much information every single day and the only way to possibly parse through all of it is to take shortcuts which inevitably lead to errors.

Connor and I were joking about this today when it comes to parenting and housework. We know what needs to get done every day for our lives to run smoothly, and it’s actually quite a simple and easy list. And yet we constantly find ourselves in bad habits because our brains don’t give the right “weight” to different options in terms of outcome.

It turns out that if I give my kids 20 minutes of really intense “mommy time” in the morning where we do a puzzle or a craft or play some card games, they play really nicely together. Similarly:

• When I resist the urge to let them watch screens and push through the 10 minutes of whiny boredom, they come up with awesome games to play.
• When Connor and I are consistent about only offering nutritious foods instead of making easy, quick, non-nutritive meals, our kids start eating vegetables again.
• When we actually do a ten-minute tidy instead of collapsing on the couch to doom-scroll we have a tidy house.
• When we take a minute to set a timer to remind ourselves to start prepping dinner at 4:00 we don’t end up panicking and getting pizza at 6:20.
• When we put the laundry away as soon as it’s done we stop ending up having to re-wash a load when someone thought the basket was dirty and threw a nasty wash rag on the top.

But what’s the real reason those things don’t get done? Because it’s easier to not do them.

It’s easier in the moment to do nothing, but we pay for it in the future.

Humans are simply not good at assessing risk.

(This is a wonderful write-up from McGill University that explains it quite well.) But in essence, we often think that rare issues are very very common and we underestimate the actual risk of the things more likely to harm us. We prioritize current comfort over the actual long-term risk assessment that is based in data.

We overestimate the likelihood that the weird, fringe thing will happen in a way that causes us to ignore the actual risk in front of us.

An example in the article above is that after 9/11 so many people drove long journeys instead of flying that it actually caused over 1,500 additional deaths due to motor vehicle accidents. People were (understandably) so frightened about what felt like the salient risk of flying that they forgot about the much much higher risk of the alternative, and it actually led to an additional fifteen hundred deaths.

We tend to make decisions based on emotion rather than fact.

Even silly little things like whether or not I make my kids eat veggies today. I know that my brain is going to default to doing the easy thing now because it’s going to underestimate the long-term impact because my brain is trying to avoid discomfort.

It is our job to push through the discomfort and do what is the right choice even when it feels icky.

Sometimes “icky” isn’t the right word—sometimes it’s scary. Terrifying. Anxiety-provoking. Life-changing.

But we have heard so many stories of couples who didn’t speak up because it was easier to keep quiet. Couples who put off the inevitable conversations for so long that they became marriage-ending ones rather than simple corrections in year one or two. People who wasted decades at churches that never valued them because they didn’t want to have to find a whole new community.

And these decisions all make sense when you look at how our brains work. These decisions are logical based on what the felt threat was.

But the felt threat was just a distraction from the real problem. Because at the end of the day, those couples still had to have that conversation but now there’s 20 years of marriage baggage behind it.

Those people still left the churches and had to find new community, but they could have avoided years of suffering if they had focused on the real threat rather than the felt one.

Or maybe they didn’t ever leave the church, and now the problem was passed on to their children and grandchildren and their inaction has heaped burdens onto the next generation that never needed to exist.

Many people are perpetuating systems and cycles because they’re fleeing what feels bad right now instead of addressing the actual, much larger threat.

As Christians, this is what I believe that “take up our cross” really means.

It isn’t about destroying the concept of the self, it isn’t about erasing who we are; it’s about doing the hard work, day after day, that we would rather avoid because we know that sacrifice is necessary for real, meaningful change. Because we know someone is going to have to be that sacrifice, and as Christians we should be the first to stand up and take on the burden of doing what is right.

And yet so often we stay silent when our pastor says something on Facebook that is a racist dogwhistle, or we fail to have that conversation with a friend because we don’t want to rock the boat, or we stay so focused on our personal “rights” that we forget we are supposed to lay it all down for our neighbours.

I believe all of this can be explained by poor risk assessment.

Throughout the gospels, Jesus implores us to not get so caught up in things that don’t matter that we forget what’s truly important.

• Are we allowing fear about perceived risk to distract us from the real threat of missing the call of God?
• Are we inadvertently dooming others to suffering and injustice because it would be too uncomfortable to do the right thing now?

It seems easy to stay at the church that might have some questionable (read: racist, sexist, etc.) theology because they have a good kids’ program—our kids need community after all! The felt risk there is that our kids won’t have Christian friends or might find church boring. But what’s the risk or raising children in a community that sees people as more or less dispensable based on their nationality, gender, or skin colour? Which one actually has long-term soul effects?

It feels scary to question our beliefs and really pick stuff apart because it could mean that we have to build a whole new foundation for our faith, politics, or whatever worldview you might feel the need to re-think. But if the reality is that we have built our worldview on a foundation of sand, the much larger risk is that we may wake up a decade later and realize that we perpetuated a lot of unnecessary suffering. If our beliefs hold up under scrutiny, then great no harm no foul. But if they don’t, then it’s even more important that we address them as quickly as we can. The couples who deal with their sexism year 1 have a much easier time than those who address it in year 15, who have an easier time than those who address it year 40.

But the worst part is the emails from people who, after finally opening their hearts to the questions and doubts they’d been having for decades, realized that they had perpetuated and enabled the abuse of others because they weren’t willing to do the hard work of asking, “What if I’m wrong?”

It’s awful to hear the regret.

Please, don’t be so scared of discomfort that you doom yourself to more of it down the road.

Resist the innate desire in us to continue cycles because it’s easier, and instead do the work to make a better future for the next generation.

Don’t set yourself up for regret because you were unwilling to recognize the real threat.

You are braver than you think, stronger than you feel, and have more influence than you’ve been led to believe.

And I’m not going to lie, yes, it’s harder in the moment to actually face the beast and do the things you’ve been putting off or psychologically suppressing.

But on the other side is freedom and peace.

What do you think? Have you seen people delay setting clear boundaries or making a change because it seemed easier? Let’s talk in the comments!