The book You are not so smart . . . is a motivational, self-improvement book which was written by David McRaney and published in 2011. It describes extensive rules for living a life more realistically rather virtually. It tells about 48 brain bugs that mold human behavior, and shows how humans in this 20th century are changing themselves for fitting in trending culture.
The first chapter of the book is about priming, which tells how we are being influenced by things socially. What goes around affects our brain unconsciously. Many times our decisions are not only ours but also the consequences of our choices. Our opinions form by the ideas on which we pay attention. We lie to ourselves and create fictional narratives to explain our emotions and behaviors. It is unhealthy for the human brain. Our mind creates illusions and makes us feel untrue emotions.
Moving further, the narrator talks about fallacies, which strikes us severely. He talks about the failure to think about thinking. We make things up and create fantasies. Man is a social animal, and in the social structure, we try to help each other, but virtual reality changed everything. We have become more vulnerable in our space, which is terrible. We cannot deny our scientific programming for a more extended period.
The narrator precisely wants to tell us that having a friend list of 5000 friends on Facebook doesn't mean that all those people are your friends. All of them are just virtual data saved as information. The more people see us in problem, the less they come to help. They don't help us in real-life. Instead, they make us feel more lonely. It's positive if we focus on our real-life attention more, the physical appearance of people, real pleasure, and fulfillment.
The title of this book is a satire itself, to awaken people who are living life in their shut-off mentalities — a reality different from the real world. Thinking about ideas does not lead us anywhere until we take action. We should make better and healthy connections in the physical world instead of wasting time on any social media.
