We humans tend to make tend to make our joy too sweet to enjoy. We then become scared of being joyful. We tend to do the same everywhere. When we make a cake, we make it too sweet and then add salt to enhance its sweetness.
Salt helps in enriching the taste of the cake by making it taste sweeter. This is because salt helps certain ingredients release their flavor with ease.
This is the salt effect and its paradox. Salt makes sweets sweeter if added in appropriate amounts.
What does this have to do with our attitude to life?
Imagine someone being overly optimistic. You build sweet hopes that shall not materialize. The rosy picture of what we hoped for becomes dry. Its sweet cake turns very salty with disappointment.
Being overly optimistic leads to taking unnecessary risks without having enough information to build realistic hopes for them.
We see this tendency recurring in many fields and activities.
- In the stock markets, there are investors who convince themselves that the shares they buy shall make great profits. The sweet cake of expectations ends up salty with those investors losing most of their investments.
- A person telling friends that his interview was so good that he shall get the job he has desired for a long time. He brags about the interview and his performance in it. He receives an apology letter. His sweetness turns salty.
- I know of a friend who expected his pregnant wife to give birth to a boy. He was considering many names, which name to give his son. His wife delivered a girl. For six months, he avoided looking at his daughter because she was unwelcome. He poured his disappointment on his innocent baby.
The above-selected examples are examples of what we know as the positivity bias or optimism bias. One bias leads to another one. Optimism bias leads to overconfidence bias. This affects our attitudes.
Those biases shape our attitudes and we isolate ourselves from reality. We need to buffer such biases. We do not do as we keep adding more sugar to the cake of our optimism. The cake becomes inedible. We then face the reality. We then add too much salt to the cake. We make it appalling to eat.
We may master the art of making great cakes in the kitchen but fail to make a great cake because of our attitudes toward life.
We need to restore balance to our attitudes.