Overcompensating 过度补偿, 過剰補償, 과잉보상

I’m writing this entry sitting on a United Airlines flight, unable to sleep because the cabin is so cold. It wasn’t already so cold on this plane, in fact it was warm, hot and humid when we left George Busch International Airport in Houston on a hot and muggy morning, so the pilot took it upon himself to compensate for that heat by turning up the air conditioning and blowing cool air from every single vent above everyone’s seat…. Sure enough now it’s freezing cold, at least 10 degrees cooler than what it was a few hours ago. Unfortunately my spectrum of comfort is only about 5 to 7 degrees each way from 72 degrees, the average room temperature, so now I feel very very underdressed when I go out for a run on a cold winter day. I find the pilot’s overcompensation to be an allegory of human mind’s attitudes and behavior: we often ignore things that are pressing issues, letting them sit there until they become an emergency, and then we overreact, overcorrect, and overcompensate the other way to make it just as bad the other way, sometimes even worse, like reacting to a deer on the highway by veering violently to the side and crashing your own car. We eat way too much because we’re hungry and our body tells us we need sustenance, but then we overcompensate by gorging ourselves with food (most of us, anyway) that most of it turns into fat and extra pounds. We overcorrect for alcohol by installing Prohibition with the 18th amendment but then have to repeal it with the 21st Amendment. In sports, teams often overcorrect for the market inefficiency of trading three pointers for two-pointers to the point of the whole league now shooting way too many three pointers, passing up open layups for the chance at a three. The three-point shot itself, of course, was an over correction to having all shots count the same, they wanted to spice it up for more offense and excitement. Most of entertainment often shifts based on the zeitgeist of zombie culture shifting to a vampire culture to apocalyptic shows to reality TV- we have a glut of all of these. The most important overreaction, though, is the political one and how we wound up with Donald Trump as our president, almost an unbelievable twist of fate for most but explainable by how the masses of our country believe and behave. The 2016 election was shaped by people being tired of the political elite and 8 years of Democratic rule, so people craved a renegade populist candidate like Trump to fight back against those elites (supposedly Trump was fighting for the Everyman), 2020 was reacting to 4 years of Trump fatigue of tweets, crimes, impeachment, craziness, but most perceived the Biden reign as even crazier with the woke movement and various social issues like trans people in sports, and suddenly in 2024 we went back to Trump, like a yo-yo going back and forth. And the overreaction is costing us by allowing Trump to believe he has a mandate to do whatever he wants with his political capital, implement tariffs Willy-nilly, deport immigrants haphazardly, and fire government workers through DOGE. It really feels like living in 2 different timelines, the way political attitudes shift and change, with radicals on both sides driving the hatred for the other side and making it about beating the other team, not really about doing what’s best for the country. It sucks. What can we do about overreaction? Stop reacting to everything that’s “crazy” in the newspapers. Focus on what we can do and have ability to change, not get caught up by hate or mania or radicalism. Very hard to do now with the internet the way it is and having information pumped in to our minds every second, every hour of the day, but I feel a lot of my friends and very educated people, smarter than me, miss the point of life and implications of what they’re doing: they’re so incensed by everything in the world and so intent on reacting to the bad that they miss something key: that overreacting could be just as bad as ignoring it.