Brain Food #759
Heaven's Reward Fallacy
Thoughts of the day
One of the most interesting, and least known, cognitive distortions I came across recently was Heaven’s Reward Fallacy, our expectation that all the sacrifices we make now will be rewarded at some point in the future, in the form of some imaginary Eden - some people also refer to this as karma.
The reference to Heaven, of course, springs from the bargaining that religion offers, that if we are ‘good’ today, with a good measure of self-denial and sacrifice, we will eventually get what we deserve.
The truth is that sometimes the rewards will not come, and so Heaven’s Reward Fallacy can lead to entitlement, bitterness, and disappointment.
This does not necessarily mean we should adopt a hedonistic lifestyle that neglects any sense of purpose or hard work. But by accepting the randomness of life, we can seek pleasure in the process of our everyday tasks, without anchoring our happiness on a future event that we cannot be entirely confident about.
And perhaps some rewards will eventually come, but most likely from where we do not expect them.
Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights is a smorgasbord of surreal scenes, an uncanny version of Heaven that might ignite one’s curiosity, but not necessarily the desire to be there.
Very few well-known paintings of Heaven exist, and those that do often depict Hell next to it (which is a far more popular topic). Even what we think we deserve and should expect is, in fact, very hard to imagine.
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